Posters, flyers and stickers are available at the ANSWER office. Call 415-821-6545 for convenient pick-up times. All are encouragedto view outreach and talking to your neighbors as crucial to building this action.

IRSN San Francisco St. Patrick's Day Parade Anti-Imperialist ContingentSaturday, March 14th, 10:45 A.M. The assembly point will be on 2nd Street, between Folsom and Harrison Streets (look for the van). The parade will move out at 11:30 and walk to City Hall.

The comrades of the International Republican Socialist Network in San Francisco apologize for this late update, but we are dependent on the parade committee, which only provided assembly information today.

The IRSN will again be participating in the San Francisco St. Patrick's Day Parade and hosting an Anti-Imperialist Contingent to provide a republican socialist presence in the event.

As in previous years, the Anti-Imperialist Contingent will march first (# 72 in the parade line-up) behind a banner declaring "No War But the Class War." We invite participating organizations joining us to bring their own identifying banners, but will have others available and we remind our comrades in other socialist, anarchist, or anti-imperialist groups that the parade is one week before the anti-war demonstration of March 21st and therefore an excellent opportunity to distribute information about that demonstration.

Also as in the past, the Anti-Imperialist Contingent will be followed by a van, transformed into a moving billboard and the content of the vans' decoration will focus on specifically Irish concerns. This year it will note the 40th anniversary of the occupation by the British Army in 1969 and the 10th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement--concludi ng that all that has been won is the "peace of the grave." The van will be # 73.

The assembly is earlier this year and comrades are asked to be there not later than 10:45, on Saturday, March 14th. The assembly point will be on 2nd Street, between Folsom and Harrison Streets (look for the van). The parade will move out at 11:30 and walk to City Hall.

Following the parade, anyone participating with the IRSN will be welcome to join us for an after parade party featuring Margaritas and nachos--a tradition for us and a little known ethnic cuisine of the Irish nation, sort of...well the Margaritas are greenish anyway. As former participants can attest, the after party usually features some great discussion in a comradely setting, and we rarely send anyone away without some psychotropic alteration.

Please come out an help the comrades of the IRSN heighten the political content of this San Francisco tradition and help to build for the anti-war demonstration on March 21st.

Absolutely noone with shoes featuring curled up toes will be admitted.

"Fund Education, Not War!"Mass March to Rescue EducationMon. March 16, 10am-2pmJoin the ANSWER contingent at the Mar. 16th march and rally. Call 415-821-6545 or look for the ANSWER banner at the demonstration, "Fund Education, Not War!

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------**---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*March against the war on March 21

Dear friends,

During his presidential campaign, Obama's popularity surged with the promise that he would bring the troops home from Iraq within 16 months. But his recently announced plan would continue the illegal occupation indefinitely. It would leave up to 50,000 troops in that war-torn country for who knows how many years. And it would delay the withdrawal of the first batch of troops to 19 months.

"When President Obama said we were going to get out within 16 months, some people heard, 'get out,' and everyone's gone. But that is not going to happen," said a senior military officer.

This plan doesn't "leave Iraq to its people and responsibly end this war", as Obama claimed during his Congressional address of Feb. 24. Instead it entrenches the U.S. in a brutal counter-insurgency war that helped to bankrupt our country and sends an endless stream of Americans to continue dying and killing.

The U.S. government, the American people, and the Iraqi people need to hear our voices of opposition on March 21.

Last week, Sec. of Defense Gates and President Obama announced their plan to deploy an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan - that's a 50 percent increase - despite the fact that the Department of Defense has no exit strategy. And the U.S. is expanding the covert war run by the CIA inside neighboring Pakistan.

We cannot afford another quagmire.Please join us in Washington, SF, and LA on March 21.Go to www.pentagonmarch.org for more information

Meanwhile the U.S.-funded occupation and blockade of Gaza continues after an assault in which 100's of civilians were killed and even a United Nations school was not spared from the onslaught of human rights crimes and violations of international law.

The people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Palestine are struggling to rid themselves of deadly, racist occupations. We need to unite in the realization that the movement in solidarity with the people of Palestine is the same as the movements in solidarity with the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. Let us stand together with each other and with them, and say:

Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, occupation is a crime!

The people of the world need to hear from Americans that we are against the racist U.S. wars of aggression and occupation. We have an historic responsibility to raise our voices and be heard, to march with our banners held high and be seen, demanding

Bring ALL the troops home NOW!Money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation!End U.S. support for the occupation of Palestine!No war on Iran or Pakistan!

The National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations is joining with a broadening alliance of 100's of coalitions, organizations, and networks in a united MARCH 21 NATIONAL COALITION to mobilize people across the United States to take part in a March on the Pentagon on the sixth year of the military invasion and occupation of the Iraq War: Saturday, March 21.

Demonstrations will also be held on that date in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities across the U.S.

For updated information about buses and the national March 21 coalition, which includes labor unions, peace and anti-war groups, veterans and community groups and more, see: www.pentagonmarch.org

These actions will remind the nation and the world that the U.S. antiwar movement - marching behind a banner demanding "Out Now!' - will intensify its struggle to stop the wars.

The actions are needed to assure the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and other countries threatened by Washington's expansionist policies that tens of millions of people in this country support their right to settle their own destinies without U.S. interventions, occupations and murderous wars. International law recognizes - and we demand - that the U.S. respect the right to self-determination. We reject any notion that the U.S. is the world's self-appointed cop.

The March 21 united mass actions are also needed at this time of economic meltdown to demand jobs for all; a moratorium on foreclosures; rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure; guaranteed, quality health care for all; an end to the ICE raids and deportations; and funding for sorely needed social programs. So long as trillions of dollars continue to be spent on wars, occupations, and bailouts to the banks and corporate elite, the domestic needs of the people of the U.S. can never be met.

For more information about the National Assembly please visit: www.natassembly.org

March 21, in D.C., will culminate in a dramatic direct action where hundreds of coffins-representing the multinational victims of militarism, Empire and corporate greed-will be carried and delivered to the headquarters of the Corporate War Profiteers and Merchants of Death.

From the Pentagon, we will march to the nearby giant corporate offices of Boeing Company, Lockheed Martin Corporation, General Dynamics and KBR (the former subsidiary of Halliburton).

A March 21 Labor Rally and contingent to March 21 will be held in the grassy area just South of Market Street in Justin Herman PlazaSaturday, March 21 Rally at 10:30 a.m. // Form contingent to march at 11:45 a.m.http://uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?id=18479

A message from Army Spc. Agustín Aguayo,Iraq War veteran and war resister

Since the day I surrendered to military custody after refusing to return to Iraq, Courage to Resist has been there for me and my family as a constant fountain of support. This support has come in many forms, from a friendly call, to organizing a campaign to cover my legal expenses and basic needs. I believe only an organization with altruistic motives that truly cares would have done this. As someone who has felt the enormous relief of having a strong support group behind me, it is a privilege now as a member of Courage to Resist to help others as I have been helped.

11) Two Articles Against: JROTC in S.F. SchoolsSchool Board Should Be SupportedLetter to the Editor, by TOM AMMIANOBay Area ReporterMarch 12, 2009http://ebar.com/openforum/opforum.php?sec=lettersWhat Next if JROTC Stays?Letter to the Editor, by Michael JobBay Area ReporterMarch 12, 2009http://ebar.com/openforum/opforum.php?sec=letters

19) Obama Signals Readiness to Further Militarize Drug War with Potential Deployment of National Guard to Mexico BorderMarch 13, 2009http://www.democracynow.org/2009/3/13/obama_signals_readiness_to_further_militarize

The new recessionwhen rich folks must shop Costcoto save on Chanel.MAYA LELANDKaneohe, Hawaii

It's 2009 and still they show womenwith long, open legs on high heelsnext to the car they want me to buy.I have never known such a dream-girl,no surprise here, as I've never ownedthe right wheels, even though I am sureI would enjoy it all very much for a while.My own car is more likely to be seenabove an oily mechanic, andmy woman, she wears socks in bed,sometimes two pairs in the winter.GRÉGOIRE VIONSantz Cruz, Calif.

I worked 50 years since I was 16Saw visions ahead of the American dreamSaved and I saved, no splurges in sightBought an apt at the market's heightMaxed my IRA and 401 tooPut it in blue chips, not CDOs like youI dreamed of Paris and Venice and RomeBut I'll be staying a lot closer to homeWhile all the bankers enjoyed their spreeFinanced by naïve ones like you and like meBARBARA ROSTONNew York, N.Y.

OK401K40.1K4.01K.401K.0401KNOT OKGERALD DUFFYPortsmouth, N.H.

Last weekendi wanted to buy somethingspend a grand or two.But then I remembered what the tv saidabout the futureabout tomorrowabout how I may not have a job.So I sat by the windowand watchedthe snow fall instead.THOMAS BERNARD MARBLOCharlotte, N.C.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. - Some high school teachers worry about grooming students for admission to elite universities. Judah Lakin worries about getting his students' immigration papers so that they can afford college.

Illegal immigrants do not qualify for federal financial aid, and those living in Rhode Island, as in 39 other states, do not qualify for in-state tuition at public universities. Since out-of-state tuition is about three times as high as in-state, many young immigrants forgo higher education.

Mr. Lakin, a 26-year-old history teacher at Hope High School here, is out to change that.

"One of my students has been here since she was 1 year old, but she can't afford to pay the out-of-state rate to a university in a place she's grown up in," Mr. Lakin said. "Her mother has a work permit and pays taxes here, yet her daughter is essentially denied access to higher education."

The difference in the cost of tuition is considerable. At the University of Rhode Island, out-of-state students pay $24,776 a year, compared with $8,678 for in-state students. In the last few years, Mr. Lakin has become the go-to person for immigrants at Hope High School. Ever since he helped one student navigate the bureaucracy to gain citizenship and raised money on her behalf, he has had students, parents, teachers and even other schools asking him for assistance.

Mr. Larkin wants the school district to give presentations each school year encouraging illegal immigrants in all grades to go to organizations that can advise them on their legal options. He said that would have greatly benefited the student who had been in the country since she was an infant.

"This student always assumed she'd go to a good college," Mr. Lakin said. "She's used to getting awards and internships, but nobody ever explained to her the gravity of what remaining undocumented would mean for her college prospects."

Twenty-two percent of Rhode Island children live in immigrant families, according to the advocacy group Rhode Island Kids Count.

"People think immigration status is black and white, but in a lot of cases, people can qualify as being here legally but don't know how to approach the process," said Carl Kruger, a staff lawyer at the International Institute of Rhode Island, an organization that assists immigrants. "They need to know how to get relatives to petition for them or to find out how else they could qualify."

But some of Mr. Lakin's students will have to wait many years to earn citizenship. One student he tried to help is working as a dishwasher because, without financial aid, he cannot pay for college.

Grace Diaz, a state legislator, has introduced legislation that would make students who have lived in the state for more than three years eligible for in-state tuition.

"I testify in support of her legislation whenever it comes up," said Robert Carothers, who has been president of the University of Rhode Island for 18 years. "It does no good to keep people who live here from an education by which they could make contributions back to the state. It perpetuates ignorance, which is not in our interest."

The office of Gov. Donald L. Carcieri would not comment on the legislation.

But Terry Gorman, executive director of Rhode Islanders for Immigration Law Enforcement, is strongly opposed. "I think it's unfair to U.S. citizens to have to pay the tax burden for the college educations of illegals," he said.

Debate on this issue continues nationally, with 30 states having considered legislation to allow illegal immigrants to receive in-state tuition since 2001, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Ten states passed the legislation, but in 2007 Oklahoma repealed its law.

Even if the Federal Dream Act, which would provide a path to citizenship to immigrants who go to college or serve in the military, were to pass, it would not necessarily resolve the issue of in-state tuition because states could rule that temporary residents are not eligible, said Michael Olivas, a law professor at the University of Houston.

WARREN BUFFETT knows there's something very unfair about the American tax system. He's often complained that while his 2006 tax rate (for federal income taxes and Social Security withholding) on $46 million of income was 17.7 percent, his secretary's combined tax rate was 30 percent.

There are effectively two tax systems in America: one for the very rich and one for the rest of us. Income from stock dividends and capital gains, which makes up a disproportionate amount of the earnings of the very rich, is taxed at 15 percent. But the bulk of what the rest of us earn - wages and interest from savings accounts - is taxed at up to 35 percent. Though President Obama's recent tax proposals are progressive and comprehensive, his reforms don't do nearly enough to address this significant disparity.

Yes, President Obama's plan would eliminate the loophole that has allowed hedge fund titans, whose income comes in no small part from management fees, to be taxed at just 15 percent instead of the ordinary income tax rate.

Families earning more than $250,000 and singles earning more than $200,000 would likewise see taxes on their wages and interest increased to a top rate of 39.6 percent from 35 percent. And the rate on both capital gains and dividends on the sale of stock would increase, but only to 20 percent from 15 percent. These changes lessen the unfairness in our tax system; they don't eliminate it.

The gap between the tax rates for the rich and the rest of us is relatively recent. Until 1921, capital gains were taxed at the same rate as ordinary income. Then Congress enacted a law that taxed capital gains at 12.5 percent while ordinary income was taxed at as much as 58 percent.

In the decades since, the tax rate on capital gains varied - sometimes it increased, sometimes it decreased. But with the exception of a brief period in the late 1980s, it was always lower than the tax on ordinary income. That was not the case for stock dividends, which were taxed like wage income and savings account interest - that is, until President George W. Bush and Congress in 2003 gave dividends the same preferential treatment as capital gains. The Bush tax cuts moved our tax system too far in the wrong direction.

There is a flip side to raising the tax rates for dividends and capital gains. In this market, there won't be too much capital gain to worry about. So how should we treat capital losses?

Under current law, capital losses that exceed capital gains can be deducted up to $3,000 (losses above that limit can be carried forward indefinitely into future tax years). If we increase the tax rate on capital gains, then a more generous limit on capital losses should almost certainly be allowed. During the presidential campaign, Senator John McCain proposed increasing the $3,000 offset against ordinary income to $15,000. It's an idea worth dusting off.

The question of how to tax capital gains and dividends is one of fundamental fairness. Why should tax law treat income from savings accounts differently from income from a diversified stock portfolio? Either we push up the rates on corporate dividends and capital gains or we lower the rates on wages and interest: it's all income and it should all be taxed at the same rate.

WASHINGTON - President Obama called for sweeping changes in American education on Tuesday, urging teachers, parents and students to embrace merit pay for good teachers, a longer school day and school year and a renewed commitment to learning from grade school through adulthood.

The president said it was time to erase the limits on charter schools in some states, while at the same time closing those that are not working. His administration refers to charter schools as "laboratories of innovation." Teachers' unions oppose the schools, saying they take away funding for public schools.

In his first major speech on education speech since taking office seven weeks ago, the president said the United States' prosperity, security and even the American dream itself are at risk unless the country reverses years of decline and restores its education system to pre-eminence. "Let there be no doubt," Mr. Obama said in an address to the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce here, "the future belongs to the nation that best educates its citizens - and my fellow Americans, we have everything we need to be that nation."

"It is time to give all Americans a complete and competitive education from the cradle up through a career," Mr. Obama said. "We have accepted failure for too long - enough. America's entire education system must once more be the envy of the world."

In a proposal sure to be greeted warily by teacher unions, the president renewed his support for a merit-based system of paying educators. "It means treating teachers like the professionals they are, while also holding them more accountable," the president said. "New teachers will be mentored by experienced ones. Good teachers will be rewarded with more money for improved student achievement, and asked to accept more responsibilities for lifting up their schools."

In promoting a merit-based system of pay for teachers, the president was following through on positions he took during his campaign - and implicitly laying down a challenge to unions, traditionally reliable supporters of Democratic candidates.

The president said too many people in his party have resisted the idea of "rewarding excellence" with extra pay, while too many Republicans have opposed spending money on early education "despite compelling evidence of its importance."

"The time for finger-pointing is over. The time for holding ourselves accountable is here," Mr. Obama said. "What's required is not simply new investments, but new reforms. It is time to expect more from our students."

While the overwhelming number of teachers are "doing an outstanding job under difficult circumstances," states and school districts should be able "to move bad teachers out of the classroom."

"I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences," Mr. Obama said. "The stakes are too high. We can afford nothing but the best when it comes to our children's teachers and the schools where they teach."

The address on Tuesday was the first step in laying out the president's agenda to improve American schools, officials said, with more specifics to be outlined to Congress in the coming weeks. The president noted that the recently enacted stimulus package calls for spending some $5 billion on the Early Head Start and Head Start programs - an investment that he said would be rewarded by lower welfare rolls, fewer health care costs and less crime, as well as better classroom performance.

Mr. Obama set a goal of the United States having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020. Nothing less than that will suffice in the 21st Century, when Americans are competing in a world made ever smaller by the Internet, the president said.

The president said his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, "will use only one test when deciding what ideas to support with your precious tax dollars. It's not whether an idea is liberal or conservative but whether it works."

AT TUWANI, West Bank, Mar 9 (IPS) - "I couldn't run. My pregnancy was too far advanced and there was nowhere to hide," said Amna Salman Rabaye, 31, as she recalled the terrifying incident several months ago.

Rabaye from the Palestinian Bedouin village of At Tuwani in the southern West Bank was grazing her sheep when she was assaulted by a security guard from the adjacent illegal Israeli settlement of Ma'on.

"We saw a group of masked Israeli settlers armed with sticks and chains heading towards us. The younger shepherds ran and managed to escape, leaving me with the flock of sheep," Rabaye told IPS.

"It was physically impossible for me to run and I also didn't want the settlers to kill or steal my sheep. The security guard pushed me over but I was not injured," recalled Rabaye who was then seven months pregnant.

At Tuwani was established over 300 years ago by nomadic tribes of Bedouin who first moved into the area seeking shelter in the nearby caves. However, Israeli settlers built the adjacent Ma'on settlement in 1982. The nearby illegal outpost of Havot Ma'on was built at a later date.

Outposts normally comprise small settlements ranging from a few caravans, which are sometimes connected to water and electricity, to slightly larger settlements. They are referred to as outposts by the media as they are generally not recognised by the Israeli government.

The settlements, however, which are legal under Israeli law can number from several hundred residents to small towns with thousands of inhabitants, and all the associated infrastructure.

There are nearly 300,000 Israeli settlers living in the West Bank and nearly 200,000 in East Jerusalem, according to the Israeli information centre for human rights B'Tselem.

Under international law, including various UN Security Council resolutions, the settlements are built illegally on Palestinian land.

The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring citizens from its own territory to the occupied territory (Article 49). The Hague Regulations prohibit an occupying power from undertaking permanent changes in the occupied area unless these are due to military needs in the narrow sense of the term, or unless they are undertaken for the benefit of the local population.

Nevertheless Israeli settlement building on the West Bank has accelerated at an unprecedented rate in the last few years.

This has included the enlargement of already existing settlements and the establishment of new ones, contrary to every understanding and peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

Israeli human rights group Peace Now released a report several weeks ago stating that the Israeli government is currently building an additional 73,300 illegal housing units in the West Bank. The report added that this would increase the total number of Israeli settlers in the area by 100 percent.

International human rights organisations have argued that the motive behind the accelerated settlement building is to establish facts on the ground and to make the establishment of a viable, contiguous and independent Palestinian state near impossible.

Currently the West Bank is effectively divided into three cantons by military checkpoints and the settlements. Palestinian towns and villages are surrounded by Israeli settlements while swathes of their land has been confiscated to build settlers-only bypass roads.

While Israeli officials are furthering the facts-on-the-ground scenario through official government policies, an unofficial war between Israeli settlers and Palestinian villagers over the continued land expropriation continues unabated.

"The settlers are carrying out a deliberate policy to try and drive us off our land and intimidate us into leaving so that they can take our land," said Hafez Hreini, 37, one of the villagers. Hreini's mother, 79-year-old Fatima, was left bleeding after a settler threw a rock at her head in another encounter with the settlers.

"It is very hard not to physically retaliate when you see people attack your elderly mother but I know if I had done anything back, the Israelis would have used this as an excuse to arrest me and a lot worse," Hreini told IPS. "So we are deliberately applying a policy of non-violence and we are determined to stay here and keep our land."

In 2006 the villagers lost over 100 sheep after the settlers sprayed pesticides on their grazing land. Several donkeys belonging to the village were stabbed to death. The village's water wells have also been poisoned on numerous occasions while crops have been set ablaze. The children of the village and the surrounding villages have been regularly attacked by the settlers as they try to make their way to school.

A group of outraged Israeli intellectuals wrote to incumbent Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert several years ago requesting action be taken against the settlers. This led former Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz to order the demolition of Havot Ma'on settlement but the demolition never took place.

The Israeli Knesset, or parliament, also ordered the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) to escort children to and from school to protect them from the settlers. But according to international members of the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) who live in the village, the IDF patrols are irregular, unreliable and sometimes sources of hostility towards the children.

The CPT have created their own school escorts for the children, and have themselves been assaulted by the settlers. One member received head injuries severe enough to require hospitalisation.

The Israeli police seem disinterested. "It doesn't help if we go to the police because they never do anything," Sreini told IPS.

The Israeli rights group Yesh Din has stated repeatedly that only a very small number of settler attacks against Palestinians are investigated by the Israeli police. These result in even fewer arrests and practically no convictions.

While the nation's economy flounders, business is booming for The GEO Group Inc., a private prison firm that is paid millions by the U.S. government to detain undocumented immigrants and other federal inmates. In the last year and a half, GEO announced plans to add a total of at least 3,925 new beds to immigration lockups in five locations. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency and the U.S. Marshals Service, which hire the company, will fill the beds with inmates awaiting court and deportation proceedings.

GEO reported impressive quarterly earnings of $20 million on February 12, 2009, along with an annual income of $61 million for 2008 - up from $38 million the year before. But the company's share value is not the only thing that's growing. Behind the financial success and expansion of the for-profit prison firm, there are increasing charges of negligence, civil rights violations, abuse and even death.

Detaining immigrants has become a profitable business, and the niche industry is showing no signs of slowing down. The number of undocumented immigrants the U.S. federal government jails has grown by at least 65 percent in the last six years. In 2002, the average daily population of immigration detainees was 20,838 people, according to ICE records. By 2008, the average daily population had grown to 31,345.

Since 2003, more than a million people have been processed through federal immigration lockups, which are part of a network of at least 300 local, state and federal lockups, including seven contracted detention facilities. GEO operates four of those seven for-profit prisons.

At the company's Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, federal prosecutors charged a GEO prison administrator in September 2008 with "knowingly and willfully making materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statements to senior special agents" with ICE, according to court filings. A February 2008 audit found that over a period of more than two years ending in November 2005, GEO hired nearly 100 guards without performing the required criminal background checks. The GEO employee responsible, Sylvia Wong, pleaded guilty. In the plea agreement the federal government stated that Wong falsified documents "because of the pressure she felt" while working at the GEO lockup to get security personnel hired at the detention center "as quickly as possible."

Two months before the fraud charges, a study by the Seattle University School of Law and the nonprofit group OneAmerica reported that conditions at the Tacoma facility violated both international and domestic laws that grant detained immigrants the right to food, due process and humane treatment.

Federal immigration officials have the authority to incarcerate undocumented immigrants, asylum-seekers, and even lawful permanent residents while they await hearings with immigration judges or appeal decisions. ICE reports the average length of stay is 30 days, but detentions can last years, according to a November 2008 ICE fact sheet.

Pramila Jayapal, executive director with OneAmerica, took part in interviewing a random sample of more than 40 immigrants detained at the Northwest Detention Center, which holds approximately 1,000 immigrants at any given time.

"It's a very giant concrete box. It's just like a jail," said Jayapal. "You're only supposed to meet in the client area, which is only a few rooms."

One inmate from Mexico, Hector Pena-Ortiz, told interviewers that guards had interrogated and handcuffed him twice, demanding that he sign immediate deportation papers despite the fact that he had a pending appeal. Under federal law, immigrants cannot be deported from the United States if their immigration legal cases are still pending. During one of the incidents, guards admitted to having a file on the wrong inmate, Pena-Ortiz said.

In addition to violations of legal rights, inmates cited food as a major concern. The vast majority of the 40 prisoners interviewed at the facility said rations were inadequate and sometimes rotten. Inmates with financial resources depended on food bought from the lockup's commissary. Others went hungry. A man identified in the study as "Ricardo" said he had lost 50 pounds of his original 190-pound weight since arriving at the detention center.

ICE officially denied the claims in the report, but in 2005, annual agency inspections at the Northwest Detention Center documented problems with the quality and quantity of food and found that some meals were so poor, guards had to collect and replace them.

Looking for Opportunities

The Tacoma lockup, site of the most recent GEO controversy, is located on top of a former toxic waste dump that borders coastal wetlands near the Port of Tacoma, Washington. In August 2008, the firm announced plans to expand its 1,030-bed Northwest Detention Center to 1,575 beds, "to help meet the increased demand for detention bed space by federal, state, and local government agencies around the country."

Just four months after GEO's announcement, ICE notified government contractors that the agency was looking for a contractor-owned and -operated detention facility. According to federal procurement data, the new facility should be capable of providing 1,575 beds - the same number GEO was set to build - to be completed no later than September 2009 - the same date GEO had set for the completion of its own construction project.

Lorie Dankers, ICE spokeswoman in Washington state, implied that the similarity in numbers and date was a coincidence. "I would never comment, nor have I in the past, on what GEO is doing and why they're doing it. That's a business decision that GEO made," said Dankers. "To insinuate that there was some kind of connection, or that they has some inside information as to the request, that would be incorrect."

Dankers added that ICE's request for more space is still in the "pre-solicitation" phase, meaning that there is no guarantee a contract will be offered, and the agency is simply requesting information from contractors to "guage interest."

"I don't have any information one way or the other as to what would happen," Dankers said. "I think often times, if I had to speculate, they see where there's a need. I think they're always looking for opportunities."

Canceled Contracts

And opportunities, like prisoners, abound. GEO owns more than 62,000 prison beds in the United States, with approximately 3,000 beds used for detained immigrants. The company also claims a global market share of 25 percent of the private corrections industry. Currently, the Northwest Detention Center incarcerates immigrants mainly from Oregon, Washington and Alaska, according to Dankers.

In the last five years, criminal immigration prosecutions have surged by 388 percent according to federal court data obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University in New York. The most recently available court information shows that there were 11,454 prosecutions in September 2008 alone. Adding to GEO's profitability and prospects are immigration laws introduced in the 1990s, the expanding use of immigration detention without bond, and a greater emphasis on prosecutions after 9/11.

The company's relationship with government officials has also proven valuable in winning corrections contracts.

In 2006, while on the state payroll as director of prisons at the Colorado Department of Corrections, Nolin Renfrow helped GEO obtain a $14 million-per-year contract to detain 1,500 inmates in a proposed state prison project in the northern part of the state. Renfrow was moonlighting for GEO -with an expected compensation of $1 million - when a 2007 state audit and news reports uncovered the public servant's business deal.

The audit found that Renfrow's actions could "arguably present a conflict of interest and result in a breach of ... the public trust," because state law prohibited an "employee from assisting any person for a fee or other compensation in obtaining any contract."

The county district attorney with jurisdiction over Renfrow declined to press criminal charges, but in the wake of the scandal, officials with the state's corrections department rescinded the contract.

Prisons as Money Makers

Immigrant facilities are not the only GEO lockups that have sparked claims of negligence and abuse.

In 2007, the firm settled a lawsuit with the family of an inmate for $200,000. LeTisha Tapia, a 23-year-old woman incarcerated at the GE0-owned Val Verde Correction Facility in southern Texas, told her family in July 2004 that she had been raped and beaten after being locked in the same cell block with male inmates. Shortly after, she had hung herself in her cell. The nonprofit Texas Civil Rights Project sued GEO on behalf of Tapia's family.

"The jail drove this young woman to kill herself," charged the family's attorney, Scott Medlock, in a February 15, 2006 press release from the Texas Civil Rights Project. "GEO cuts corners by hiring poorly trained guards, providing inmates with cut rate medical care, and running their facility in a grossly unprofessional manner." Citing confidentially provisions in the settlement, Medlock refused further comment.

More recently, in 2008, civil liberties attorneys sued the company for failing to provide adequate medical attention to inmates outsourced from Washington, DC, to the Rivers Correctional Institute, located in North Carolina and overseen by GEO through a contract with the federal Bureau of Prisons. That same year, Idaho state authorities removed 125 inmates from a GEO prison after an investigation - spurred by the suicide of a detainee at the facility - revealed poor staff training and health care.

"Pretty immediately when people started going to Rivers we started to get letters about how bad the health care was, and just how people were really scared of dying there," said Deborah Golden, an attorney with the DC Prisoners Project, a group that is representing inmates in the legal case against GEO. One inmate named in the report, Keith Mathis, claims he was denied medical treatment for a cavity until the tooth became infected and caused an open ulcer on his face that eventually "burst open," requiring surgery and three days hospitalization.

"The more we looked into the situation the more we realized it was a systemic problem," said Golden. "I suspect that it's a pattern all over. When you try to run prisons as money makers what you do is cut back on the most expensive thing you can, which is medication and medical care."

GEO has said it will not publicly comment on pending legal cases or abuse claims by third parties, including nonprofit groups. Company spokesman Pablo Paez says that on the subject of business plans, "we have no comment beyond what's in our public disclosures."

Despite a wide array grievances and tragedies, GEO has accrued contracts worth more than $588 million in federal tax dollars since 1997, according to available federal procurement data. And as long as federal officials continue to remand a growing number of inmates and immigrants over to private businesses, without imposing strict oversight, GEO will likely remain profitable.

7) Happy International Women's Day from Radical Women! March 10, 2009Radical Women

Dear Friends,

Around the world, International Women's Day is a time to commemorate the courageous battles by and for women. Inspired by the valiant struggle of female garment workers in the United States, German socialist Clara Zetkin in 1910 proposed March 8 as a working-class women's holiday to celebrate past victories and carry the fight forward.

Today we salute the women organizing for equality, social and economic justice and an end to brutal living conditions. In Iceland, women with pots and pans protested--demanding aid for people not banks, criminal investigations and electoral reform. Shortly after the demonstrations the prime minister and cabinet resigned! The Puerto Rican teachers' union, which is 80 percent women, went on strike to stop the privatization of schools. A recent general strike in France denounced cuts in teacher positions, and demanded job security and a halt to President Sarkozy's tighten-the-belt reforms. Worldwide women, men and youth poured into the streets to stop Israel's savage attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. In the U.S., Stella D'oro workers in the Bronx--largely immigrant women of color--have been on strike for over six months to prevent new owners from chopping wages by 25 percent and busting their union.

The current economic meltdown chillingly illustrates the workings of capitalism: while top dogs in banks and industry make enormous profits, everyone else faces unemployment, home foreclosures, retirement and wage cuts, tuition hikes, homelessness and hunger. In the United States, women--especially women of color and immigrants--pay the biggest price for government bailouts and economic "reform." Social programs and services such as healthcare, welfare, and education are slashed, effectively balancing the budget on the backs of women. Instead of providing more government support, conservative ideologists think women should be limited to unpaid service and caregiving at home, and poverty wages on the job!

These bitter life experiences have created an army of female organizers in every community. Women are crucial drivers in the antiwar, racial equality, immigrant, welfare rights, student and queer movements. And they recognize the necessity of uniting these struggles. Now is the time to build support and solidarity among feminist organizations.

Radical Women is for militant women who want to see real change and an end to a rotten profit system that pits us against each other in the scramble for jobs, homes, and other basic needs. We have mobilized for immigrant rights up and down the West Coast and in New York City, protested budget cuts at city council meetings, demonstrated in the streets against war and occupation, organized for queer marriage as a civil right, agitated for expanding access to abortion and reproductive healthcare, and fought alongside the homeless. We combine political education on the issues with activism on the solutions, and train women leaders. Join us!

Together, let's organize around demands that show what's needed to become a safe and healthy society. As a start:

--No more bank bailouts! Nationalize the banks under worker's control. Put the bailout money into jobs and education.

--Stop balancing the budget on the backs of the poor! Expand welfare and social services by taxing corporations.

--End U.S. military aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan and cut all aid to Israel! Put that tax money into the broken healthcare system and veteran's services.

--Halt all foreclosures on homes! Fill all the houses that have already been built. Reinstate affirmative action and put construction trades people to work repairing old homes using quality materials.

--Provide free, quality, 24-hour childcare!

These are a big step to what is most needed of all--a truly egalitarian society of shared wealth--socialism!

Email National Radical Women or find the local chapter nearest you to start collaborating on these and other issues. United, we can make things happen and open up the way toward a genuinely better future!

RIOT Stone-throwing students clashed Tuesday with paramilitary officers and the riot police in Nairobi, in a demonstration demanding the resignation of the police commissioner. On Thursday the police killed a student who was protesting the killing of two activists. Three policemen have been arrested in the student's death.

DETROIT - The Ford Motor Company said Wednesday that its new agreement with the United Automobile Workers union would save at least $500 million a year and, within several years, bring its labor costs in line with what foreign competitors pay their workers in the United States.

Ford said the deal, which U.A.W. members ratified this week, immediately reduces its all-in hourly rate, including benefits, to $55.

It said the figure would continue to shrink as more workers took buyouts and when the new-vehicle market recovered, allowing increased production.

Currently, Ford's labor costs amount to a little more than $60 an hour, including health care for retirees. Labor costs for the so-called transplant automakers, including Toyota and Honda, have been about $49 an hour in the United States and are rising, Ford estimates.

"This gets us within the ballpark of where the transplants are," Joseph R. Hinrichs, Ford's group vice president for global manufacturing and labor affairs, said. "With the buyouts and with the ability to leverage some of the other tools that are in this agreement, we think we can get there in the next couple of years, on parity with the transplants."

Ford is the only Detroit automaker not borrowing money from the federal government. General Motors and Chrysler have received $17.4 billion since December and want a total of $39 billion to help them avoid bankruptcy.

Both G.M. and Chrysler have reached concessionary deals with the U.A.W. on most issues but are still negotiating on retiree health care. A U.A.W. vice president, Cal Rapson, in a letter to local union leaders, said the G.M. contract changes "in the area of economics, pattern the U.A.W.-Ford agreement" but in other aspects are "drastically different," Bloomberg News reported.

The loans that G.M. and Chrysler have received require them to exact concessions from the union, their creditors and other stakeholders. Ford, although it is not bound by such requirements, is taking many of the same steps to improve its liquidity and become more competitive. Ford lost $14.6 billion last year, a record, as the recession led to the biggest slump in new-vehicle sales since the 1970s.

Mr. Hinrichs called the agreement, which was supported by 59 percent of U.A.W. members who voted in recent weeks, "critical to our future competitiveness."

It suspends inflation-related pay increases and performance bonuses, allows Ford to save as much as $6.5 billion by substituting shares of its stock for cash it must pay into a new retiree health care fund and eliminates the jobs bank, a controversial program that allowed workers to continue receiving nearly full pay after being laid off. Now workers whose jobs are eliminated will receive less pay, for a shorter period, and will lose that benefit if they refuse to take a job that opens up anywhere in the country.

"The agreement we have in place today significantly reduces the cost of our excess labor pool and also caps that liability over time," Mr. Hinrichs said.

G.M. and Chrysler also have eliminated their jobs bank programs. They have until March 31 to show President Obama's auto industry task force that they are making progress on the broad restructuring plans that they submitted last month.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Four states - California, South Carolina, Michigan and Rhode Island - registered unemployment rates above 10 percent in January, and the national rate is expected to hit double digits by year-end.

The Labor Department's report on state unemployment, released Wednesday, showed the increasing damage inflicted on workers and companies from a recession, now in its second year. Some economists now predict the unemployment rate will hit 10 percent by year-end, and peak at 11 percent or higher by the middle of 2010.

In December, only Michigan had a double-digit jobless rate. One month later, four states did and that did not count Puerto Rico, where the unemployment rate actually dipped to 13 percent in January, from 13.5 percent in December.

California's unemployment rate jumped to 10.1 percent in January, from 8.7 percent in December, as jobs have disappeared in the construction, finance and retail industries.

Michigan's jobless rate jumped to 11.6 percent in January, the highest in the country. The second-highest jobless rate was South Carolina at 10.4 percent. Rhode Island was next at 10.3 percent, which was a record high for the state in federal records dating to 1976. California rounded out the top four.

Forty-nine states and the District of Columbia registered unemployment rate increases. Louisiana was the only state to record a monthly drop. Its unemployment rate fell to 5.1 percent in January, from 5.5 percent in December.

The unemployment rate, released last week, rose to 8.1 percent in February, the highest in more than 25 years.

Employers are laying off workers, holding hours down and freezing or cutting pay as the recession eats into sales and profits.

And more layoffs are on the way. The National Semiconductor Corporation said Wednesday that it would lay off 1,725 employees, more than a quarter of its work force, after third-quarter profits fell 71 percent.

The industrial conglomerate United Technologies, which makes Otis elevators and Sikorsky helicopters, said on Tuesday that it would lay off 11,600 workers, or 5 percent of its work force. Dow Chemical said on Monday that it would cut 3,500 jobs at the chemical company, Rohm & Haas, as part of its $15 billion buyout of the company.

Nationwide, the recession has claimed a net total of 4.4 million jobs since December 2007, and has left 12.5 million people searching for work - more than the population of Pennsylvania.

The state unemployment report also showed that North Carolina and Oregon - along with South Carolina - notched the biggest monthly gains of 1.6 percentage points each.

North Carolina's rate soared to 9.7 percent in January, from 8.1 percent in December, while Oregon jumped to 9.9 percent, from 8.3 percent.

Meanwhile, Georgia's jobless rate climbed to 8.6 percent in January, a record high on federal records.

Wyoming continued to register the lowest unemployment rate - 3.7 percent.WASHINGTON (AP) - Four states - California, South Carolina, Michigan and Rhode Island - registered unemployment rates above 10 percent in January, and the national rate is expected to hit double digits by year-end.

The Labor Department's report on state unemployment, released Wednesday, showed the increasing damage inflicted on workers and companies from a recession, now in its second year. Some economists now predict the unemployment rate will hit 10 percent by year-end, and peak at 11 percent or higher by the middle of 2010.

In December, only Michigan had a double-digit jobless rate. One month later, four states did and that did not count Puerto Rico, where the unemployment rate actually dipped to 13 percent in January, from 13.5 percent in December.

California's unemployment rate jumped to 10.1 percent in January, from 8.7 percent in December, as jobs have disappeared in the construction, finance and retail industries.

Michigan's jobless rate jumped to 11.6 percent in January, the highest in the country. The second-highest jobless rate was South Carolina at 10.4 percent. Rhode Island was next at 10.3 percent, which was a record high for the state in federal records dating to 1976. California rounded out the top four.

Forty-nine states and the District of Columbia registered unemployment rate increases. Louisiana was the only state to record a monthly drop. Its unemployment rate fell to 5.1 percent in January, from 5.5 percent in December.

The unemployment rate, released last week, rose to 8.1 percent in February, the highest in more than 25 years.

Employers are laying off workers, holding hours down and freezing or cutting pay as the recession eats into sales and profits.

And more layoffs are on the way. The National Semiconductor Corporation said Wednesday that it would lay off 1,725 employees, more than a quarter of its work force, after third-quarter profits fell 71 percent.

The industrial conglomerate United Technologies, which makes Otis elevators and Sikorsky helicopters, said on Tuesday that it would lay off 11,600 workers, or 5 percent of its work force. Dow Chemical said on Monday that it would cut 3,500 jobs at the chemical company, Rohm & Haas, as part of its $15 billion buyout of the company.

Nationwide, the recession has claimed a net total of 4.4 million jobs since December 2007, and has left 12.5 million people searching for work - more than the population of Pennsylvania.

The state unemployment report also showed that North Carolina and Oregon - along with South Carolina - notched the biggest monthly gains of 1.6 percentage points each.

North Carolina's rate soared to 9.7 percent in January, from 8.1 percent in December, while Oregon jumped to 9.9 percent, from 8.3 percent.

Meanwhile, Georgia's jobless rate climbed to 8.6 percent in January, a record high on federal records.

11) Two Articles Against: JROTC in S.F. SchoolsSchool Board Should Be SupportedLetter to the Editor, by TOM AMMIANOBay Area ReporterMarch 12, 2009http://ebar.com/openforum/opforum.php?sec=lettersWhat Next if JROTC Stays?Letter to the Editor, by Michael JobBay Area ReporterMarch 12, 2009http://ebar.com/openforum/opforum.php?sec=letters

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School Board Should Be SupportedLetter to the Editor, by TOM AMMIANOBay Area ReporterMarch 12, 2009http://ebar.com/openforum/opforum.php?sec=letters

I respectfully disagree with my colleague Assemblywoman Fiona Ma's (D-San Francisco) position on JROTC and her proposed bill AB 223["Students want a choice," Guest Opinion, February 26]. Regardless of what one's position is regarding the JROTC program, the bill sets a dangerous precedent in usurping and overriding local control from the school board. Throughout the state, school boards must be able to make their own decisions and exercise their own control without interference from the state. This is why we have elected school boards - to provide the accountability and independence necessary to make the difficult decisions about how to provide the best possible education for our youth.

As a former teacher and school board member, I understand all too well that not everyone will always agree with every decision made but we must respect the sovereignty of their decisions. Otherwise, we risk opening a Pandora's box where local decisions may be constantly questioned and challenged by state legislators.

Last year, the San Francisco Board of Education made a decision regarding the JROTC program and it is now time to move on from this divisive issue. In these tough financial times, we must look to programs that prepare our students with skills to be successful and responsible community members in the 21st century. In June, the district will be moving forward with an alternative pilot program called SERV (Student Emergency Response Volunteers), which better serves the needs of our students and our community. The new program was supported by not only the school board but also the Youth Commission and Student Advisory Committee. SERV will provide youth with practical experience in emergency management and teach them valuable life skills.

We may not all agree all the time, but by working together we can support the school board when it makes difficult decisions instead of mandating decisions that are not ours to make.

Tom Ammiano, MemberCalifornia Assembly, 13th District

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What Next if JROTC Stays?Letter to the Editor, by Michael JobBay Area ReporterMarch 12, 2009http://ebar.com/openforum/opforum.php?sec=letters

Douglas Montgomery's letter, "Typical straight person's view" [Mailstrom, March 5] shows Fiona Ma a way to look at JROTC in San Francisco schools. Here is another.

Gerry Paratore, JROTC instructor at Balboa High, gave an overview on KALW's City Visions program on January 12. He says JROTC here inSF schools is a program run by retired military personnel. It offers no military training to the students. It uses no weapons, even for Color Guardevents. It teaches first aid, healthy life skills, non-violent conflict, rules of citizenship, critical thinking, and what it means to be a leader. It offers drill and ceremony. It does not exclude gay students. It follows the policies of the district. The most important thing about JROTC, say its supporters, is that it is not a recruitment tool in any way, shape or form by the U.S. military. (What about the uniforms?)

If all of the above is true, will the SFUSD pay other organizations a million dollars a year to offer the same curriculum to 500 students?

I'm thinking as an example: if the Vatican, through the Knights of Columbus, sponsored retired priests, wearing clerical garb, and offered exactly what JROTC does, and did not recruit the students to Catholicism or the priesthood, would this be allowed in some of our schools?

Students would show up once a week in clerical garb and would be called upon to participate in appropriate ceremonies and school events. It would not be a recruitment tool for the Catholic Church, especially if only 3 percent did go on to become Catholics and/or religious leaders. All of the above curriculum, just as JROTC does, would be taught.

One could put any name in the Vatican spot; maybe the Mormon Church would be interested.

WASHINGTON (AP) - The net worth of American households fell by the largest amount in more than a half-century of record keeping during the fourth quarter of last year.

The Federal Reserve said Thursday that household net worth dropped by a record 9 percent from the level in the third quarter.

The decline was the sixth straight quarterly drop in net worth and underscored the battering that families are undergoing in the midst of a steep recession with unemployment surging and the value of their homes and investments plunging.

Net worth represents total assets such as homes and checking accounts minus liabilities like mortgages and credit card debt.

Family net worth had hit an all-time high of $64.36 trillion in the April-June quarter of 2007 but has fallen in every quarter since that time.

The record 9 percent drop in the fourth quarter pushed total net worth down to $51.48 trillion, a level that is 20 percent below the third quarter 2007 peak.

After five straight years of sharp increases in home prices, the housing bubble burst in 2007, sending shockwaves through the financial system as banks were hit with billions of dollars of losses on mortgages and mortgage-backed securities.

The federal government created a $700 billion rescue fund for the financial system last October but so far that effort has shown only modest results in terms of getting banks to resume more normal lending patterns.

Households have also been battered by the recession that began in December 2006 and is already the longest in a quarter-century. That downturn has sent unemployment soaring to a 25-year high of 8.1 percent in February with 4.4 million jobs lost since the downturn began.

The Federal Reserve began keeping quarterly records on net worth in 1951.

BAGHDAD - An Iraqi journalist who gained widespread acclaim throughout the Arab world for hurling his shoes at President Bush during a visit here in December was sentenced to three years in jail by a court on Thursday.

The journalist, Muntader al-Zaidi, had pleaded not guilty, saying at a hearing last month that he was overcome by passion because of the suffering of the people of Iraq.

"In that moment, I saw nothing but Bush, and I felt the blood of the innocents flowing under his feet while he was smiling that smile," he said at the hearing.

The trial was postponed at that time while a judge determined if Mr. Bush's trip to Iraq was an official state visit, with the defense arguing that because it took place in the Green Zone, which was then controlled by the American military, it was not an official visit to Iraq.

Judge Abdulamir Hassan al-Rubaie declared at the start of Tuesday's hearing that Mr. Bush's visit was official, and Mr. Muntader was charged with aggression against a visiting head of state, a crime that under Iraqi law carries a maximum sentence of 15 years.

Before the verdict was read, all reporters were escorted from the courtroom. Moments after the decision, there was a brief period of pandemonium as dozens of family members and supporters expressed their outrage.

"Maliki is the son of a dog," one woman screamed, referring to the prime minister, Nuri Kamal al- Maliki. "Maliki is an agent of Bush," a man shouted.

Mr. Zaidi, under heavy police security, was quickly escorted from the court room as family members continued to protest.

As they spilled out of Iraq's Central Criminal Court, a special body set up for major crimes, including terrorism, Mr. Zaidi's lawyers -18 of whom were in court - said they would appeal the decision.

When Mr. Zaidi threw his shoes at Mr. Bush during the Dec. 14 news conference, the act seemed to capture a deeply felt emotion here. A statue depicting a large shoe was erected in Mr. Zaidi's honor in Tikrit, north of Baghdad, though it was later ordered dismantled by the Iraqi Parliament. In countries from Egypt to Iran, shoe throwing became the means of expressing protest. In Saudi Arabia, it was reported that a man offered $10 million for one of the shoes.

Mr. Zaidi, 30, has been in jail since the incident and his lawyers have claimed that he was beaten while in custody. As he entered the courtroom on Thursday wearing a light brown suit, supporters gathered outside chanted: "Hero."

Thursday's short trial, lasting about an hour, got under way after the judge declared Mr. Bush's visit official. The judge asked Mr. Zaidi if he had anything further to say in his defense.

"I am innocent," he said. "It was a natural reaction to the crime of occupation."

There was a lengthy statement by the defense team, arguing that the investigation was flawed and that the shoes were destroyed in an illegal manner. The defense also cited President Bush's own wry comments about the Dec. 14 incident as evidence of the lightness of the offense.

After ducking the flying shoes at the news conference with Mr. Maliki, Mr. Bush joked that he believed the man wore a size 10, and added, "That's what people do in a free society, draw attention to themselves."

"It was an insult not an assault," said Dhiya al-Saadi, the leader defense attorney for Mr. Zaidi.

When the verdict was read, according to witnesses in the court, Mr. Zaidi shouted, "Long live Iraq."

Outside the courtroom, Mr. Zaidi's eldest daughter fainted, and his brother, Dhurgham al-Zaidi, said that he felt the court had decided the sentence even before the trial began.

Maha al-Dori, a Parliament member from the party of the anti-American Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, said he felt the ruling showed the judges were motivated by political concerns.

"Muntader was sentenced to three years, and in the history of the Iraqi justice system, it was a set back," he said.

If you tuned into CNN last weekend, you may have seen a press conference with NBA Hall of Famer Charles Barkley and a plump, hatchet-faced lawman who calls himself "the toughest sheriff in America," Joe Arpaio. You may have caught Sheriff Joe making clear with a feral smile that no, Barkley would not be required to "wear the pink underwear." It was American law enforcement at its ugliest.

Barkley, the fast-living, big-drinking, loud-talking NBA player turned commentator, was pulled over on December 31 for driving while intoxicated. The former hoops superstar was fined $2,000, sentenced to an alcohol treatment program and ordered to install an ignition interlock device on his cars. He also had to spend three days at Sheriff Joe's notorious Tent City prison. Barkley's experience was hardly typical for Tent City. He was given his own tent, where he could eat meals in privacy. He wasn't served food surplus like the prison's infamous green bologna for meals. He didn't have to listen to the prison radio station, KJOE, which plays all of Sheriff Joe's favorite hits. He could wear a red Nike tracksuit instead of the prison jumpsuit. He also participated in the press conference where Arpaio plugged his book, America's Toughest Sheriff: How We Can Win the War Against Crime.

And, as mentioned, he didn't have to wear the pink underwear Sheriff Joe favors for those under his thumb. But there was even more "Chuck" didn't have to do as a resident of Tent City.Sheriff Joe doesn't only enjoy the thrill of knowing that his prisoners are pretty in pink. He has been known to parade the undocumented immigrants among them in shackles, wearing only their state-supplied pink underwear in front of a bevy of armed guards and a gaggle of television cameras. The mainstream media didn't travel into the dry desert heat to expose Sheriff Joe's tactics. They came because they received the press release, written by Sheriff Joe himself. In one of Sheriff Joe's "advisories," he made note of the state-of-the-art electric fence, promising that it would give "quite a shock--literally" to any escapees.

The Tent City also subjects the underwear-clad prisoners to the crushing Arizona heat, something Barkley, who was on "work release" from 8 am to 8 pm, was able to avoid. It can get blisteringly hot. Sheriff Joe's response to safety concerns was to say, "It's 120 degrees in Iraq and the soldiers are living in tents, and they didn't commit any crimes, so shut your mouths." This attitude is the reason why Maricopa County has had to pay out $43 million under Sheriff Joe's leadership in wrongful death and injury cases.

But not everyone has the resources to issue lawsuits. Sheriff Joe, a man with his own reality program and his own "civilian posse," has made a national name for himself by being on the front lines of attacks on undocumented immigrants. Sheriff Joe's methods have led the Justice Department to announce on Wednesday that it is investigating his department for "patterns or practices of discriminatory police practices and unconstitutional searches and seizures." The Arizona Republic reports that David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor, believes it is the department's first civil rights probe related to immigration enforcement.

Not surprisingly, Sheriff Joe justifies his treatment of immigrants on the most racist and intellectually specious grounds. He says that the Tent City is "a financially responsible alternative to taxpayers already overburdened by the economic drain imposed by a growing number of illegal aliens on social services like education and healthcare." This blithely ignores the fact that undocumented workers actually put more back into the economy than they extract, since they pay into Social Security and payroll taxes without getting anything back.

Barkley was shielded from the true ugliness of Sheriff Joe. But now that he is out of prison, the Arizona resident should do what he does best and speak his mind. Make no mistake, Barkley would have something to say. There was a time when Barkley was a proud Republican and entertained the idea of running for governor of Alabama. In fact, when Sheriff Joe's book came out in 1996, the blurbs on the back cover included praise from Rush Limbaugh, John McCain and, yes, Charles Barkley. But since those days, Barkley has undergone a transformation. He now says Republicans have "lost their minds." Last summer Barkley said, "What do the Republicans run on? Against gay marriage and for a war that makes no sense. A war that was based on faulty intelligence. That's all they ever talk about. That and immigration. Another discriminatory argument for political gain."

Barkley most likely understands that anti-immigrant policies are discriminatory nonsense, that the politics of poverty are critical in the United States and that there is more to life than material gain. Now that he is away from the watchful eye of Sheriff Joe, it's time for Barkley to apply those principles and call for the closing of Tent City, the removal of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the end of criminalizing the undocumented as a spectator sport.

[Dave Zirin is the author of "A People's History of Sports in the United States" (The New Press) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.]

San Francisco. When the story that the San Francisco Sheriff's Department (SFSD) was illegally strip-searching detainees and leaving them naked for hours in "cold cells" hit the front page of the Chronicle in September 2003, the public was both astonished and outraged. Gavin Newsom, then a candidate for mayor, said, "The departments involved must address these issues at once and take all appropriate steps to make sure that such conduct does not take place in the future."

Since then, a US District Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, who had filed a class-action lawsuit against SFSD for their strip-search and cold-cell policies. But instead of accepting the ruling, the City Attorney filed an appeal. Last year, the City lost its appeal-a three-judge panel of the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals heard the arguments and also ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. The City Attorney then requested an "en banc" hearing before 11 judges of the federal appellate court. This hearing will take place this month on March 26, 2009 in San Francisco.

"One has to ask why the City is pursuing policies that outrage both San Franciscans and our political leaders," said Sister Bernie Galvin, an advocate for the rights of homeless people and a plaintiff in the lawsuit. "It really doesn't make moral sense. Similar class-action lawsuits have been won in lower courts and then settled in counties far less progressive than San Francisco, including Sacramento and Dade."

Mary Bull, another plaintiff in the lawsuit, was forcibly strip-searched and then left naked for 14 hours in a "cold cell," after being arrested at an anti-war demonstration in November 2002. Bull stated, "When we were in mediation with city attorneys, I was shocked when they suggested they could win in the US Supreme Court, given Bush Administration policies that were soft on civil rights. The sad thing is, they may be right: The Bush-stacked Supreme Court may overturn all the hard-won victories against civil rights abuses in county jails, and ironically, San Francisco, considered one of the most progressive cities on earth, would be responsible for that travesty."

Jonah Zern summed up the feelings of many of the plaintiffs, "The treatment of prisoners in U.S. prisons laid the foundation for torture in Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and many will attest that conditions here are not that different. Illegal strip searches in the San Francisco County Jail must be addressed as part of a larger effort to stop the terrible human rights abuses affecting over two million prisoners currently held in the United States."

NEW DELHI - Small, sick, listless children have long been India's scourge - "a national shame," in the words of its prime minister, Manmohan Singh. But even after a decade of galloping economic growth, child malnutrition rates are worse here than in many sub-Saharan African countries, and they stand out as a paradox in a proud democracy.

China, that other Asian economic powerhouse, sharply reduced child malnutrition, and now just 7 percent of its children under 5 are underweight, a critical gauge of malnutrition. In India, by contrast, despite robust growth and good government intentions, the comparable number is 42.5 percent. Malnutrition makes children more prone to illness and stunts physical and intellectual growth for a lifetime.

There are no simple explanations. Economists and public health experts say stubborn malnutrition rates point to a central failing in this democracy of the poor. Amartya Sen, the Nobel prize-winning economist, lamented that hunger was not enough of a political priority here. India's public expenditure on health remains low, and in some places, financing for child nutrition programs remains unspent.

Yet several democracies have all but eradicated hunger. And ignoring the needs of the poor altogether does spell political peril in India, helping to topple parties in the last elections.

Others point to the efficiency of an authoritarian state like China. India's sluggish and sometimes corrupt bureaucracy has only haltingly put in place relatively simple solutions - iodizing salt, for instance, or making sure all children are immunized against preventable diseases - to say nothing of its progress on the harder tasks, like changing what and how parents feed their children.

But as China itself has grown more prosperous, it has had its own struggles with health care, as the government safety net has shredded with its adoption of a more market-driven economy.

While India runs the largest child feeding program in the world, experts agree it is inadequately designed, and has made barely a dent in the ranks of sick children in the past 10 years.

But most experts agree that providing adequate nutrition to pregnant women and children under 2 years old is crucial - and the Indian program has not homed in on them adequately. Nor has it succeeded in sufficiently changing child feeding and hygiene practices. Many women here remain in ill health and are ill fed; they are prone to giving birth to low-weight babies and tend not to be aware of how best to feed them.

A tour of Jahangirpuri, a slum in this richest of Indian cities, put the challenge on stark display. Shortly after daybreak, in a rented room along a narrow alley, an all-female crew prepared giant vats of savory rice and lentil porridge.

Purnima Menon, a public health researcher with the International Food Policy Research Institute, was relieved to see it was not just starch; there were even flecks of carrots thrown in. The porridge was loaded onto bicycle carts and ferried to nurseries that vet and help at-risk children and their mothers throughout the neighborhood.

So far, so good. Except that at one nursery - known in Hindi as an anganwadi - the teacher was a no-show. At another, there were no children; instead, a few adults sauntered up with their lunch pails. At a third, the nursery worker, Brij Bala, said that 13 children and 13 lactating mothers had already come to claim their servings, and that now she would have to fill the bowls of whoever came along, neighborhood aunties and all. "They say, 'Give us some more,' so we have to," Ms. Bala confessed. "Otherwise, they will curse us."

None of the centers had a working scale to weigh children and to identify the vulnerable ones, a crucial part of the nutrition program.

Most important from Ms. Menon's point of view, the nurseries were largely missing the needs of those most at risk: children under 2, for whom the feeding centers offered a dry ration of flour and ground lentils, containing none of the micronutrients a vulnerable infant needs.

In a memorandum prepared in February, the Ministry of Women and Child Development acknowledged that while the program had yielded some gains in the past 30 years, "its impact on physical growth and development has been rather slow." The report recommended fortifying food with micronutrients and educating parents on how to better feed their babies.

A World Food Program report last month noted that India remained home to more than a fourth of the world's hungry, 230 million people in all. It also found anemia to be on the rise among rural women of childbearing age in eight states across India. Indian women are often the last to eat in their homes and often unlikely to eat well or rest during pregnancy. Ms. Menon's institute, based in Washington, recently ranked India below two dozen sub-Saharan countries on its Global Hunger Index.

Childhood anemia, a barometer of poor nutrition in a lactating mother's breast milk, is three times higher in India than in China, according to a 2007 research paper from the institute.

The latest Global Hunger Index described hunger in Madhya Pradesh, a destitute state in central India, as "extremely alarming," ranking the state somewhere between Chad and Ethiopia.

More surprising, though, it found that "serious" rates of hunger persisted across Indian states that had posted enviable rates of economic growth in recent years, including Maharashtra and Gujarat.

Here in the capital, which has the highest per-capita income in the country, 42.2 percent of children under 5 are stunted, or too short for their age, and 26 percent are underweight. A few blocks from the Indian Parliament, tiny, ill-fed children turn somersaults for spare change at traffic signals.

Back in Jahangirpuri, a dead rat lay in the courtyard in front of Ms. Bala's nursery. The narrow lanes were lined with scum from the drains. Malaria and respiratory illness, which can be crippling for weak, undernourished children, were rampant. Neighborhood shops carried small bags of potato chips and soda, evidence that its residents were far from destitute.

In another alley, Ms. Menon met a young mother named Jannu, a migrant from the northern town of Lucknow. Jannu said she found it difficult to produce enough milk for the baby in her arms, around 6 months old. His green, watery waste dripped down his mother's arms. He often has diarrhea, Jannu said, casually rinsing her arm with a tumbler of water.

Ms. Menon could not help but notice how small Jannu was, like so many of Jahangirpuri's mothers. At 5 feet 2 inches tall, Ms. Menon towered over them. Children who were roughly the same age as her own daughter were easily a foot shorter. Stunted children are so prevalent here, she observed, it makes malnutrition invisible.

"I see a system failing," Ms. Menon said. "It is doing something, but it is not solving the problem."

In the last few months, most Americans have felt poorer. Now they have the numbers to prove it.

The Federal Reserve reported Thursday that households lost $5.1 trillion, or 9 percent, of their wealth in the last three months of 2008, the most ever in a single quarter in the 57-year history of recordkeeping by the central bank.

For the full year, household wealth dropped $11.1 trillion, or about 18 percent. Though the numbers do not yet reflect it, the decline in the stock market so far this year has probably erased trillions more in the country's collective net worth.

The next biggest annual decline in wealth came in 2002, when household net worth fell 3 percent after the collapse of the technology bubble. The most recent loss of wealth is staggering and will probably put further pressure on the economy because many people will have to spend less and save more.

Most of the wealth was lost in financial assets like stocks, which tumbled at the end of last year. The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, for instance, fell 23 percent in the fourth quarter. The value of residential real estate, the biggest asset for most families, fell much less - $870 billion, or about 4 percent.

Even the richest among us have become a lot poorer. This week, Forbes magazine published its list of the richest people in the world. At No. 1, Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, still had $40 billion to his name, but that was down $18 billion. The wealth of Warren E. Buffett, the investor whose company Berkshire Hathaway had a rare bad year, tumbled $25 billion, to $37 billion.

The loss of wealth is concentrated among the most affluent Americans, in large part because they own more stocks and bonds than the rest of the country. Only about 50 percent of households own stock, and many of them own relatively small sums in retirement accounts.

As a result of their greater wealth and higher incomes, the affluent tend to spend a lot more than their share of the population would imply. The top 20 percent of income earners spend more than the bottom 60 percent of income earners, according to calculations by Tobias Levkovich, the chief United States equity strategist at Citigroup.

"When their wealth is mauled, they are not particularly interested in spending," Mr. Levkovich said.

The Fed report released on Thursday also showed that total borrowing and lending increased at an annual rate of 6.3 percent in the fourth quarter, mostly as a result of increased borrowing by the federal government to finance its operations and various bailouts of the financial system. The government's borrowing increased at an annual rate of 37 percent.

But borrowing by households dropped 2 percent. Lending to businesses was up 1.7 percent. Recent surveys of loan officers by the Fed have shown that companies have been drawing down lines of credit that were established in the past, and that only a small fraction of the lending to the private sector is through new loans, which are much harder to obtain than in recent years.

TENAHA, Texas - You can drive into this dusty fleck of a town near the Texas-Louisiana border if you're African-American, but you might not be able to drive out of it - at least not with your car, your cash, your jewelry or other valuables.

That's because the police here allegedly have found a way to strip motorists, many of them black, of their property without ever charging them with a crime. Instead they offer out-of-towners a grim choice: voluntarily sign over your belongings to the town, or face felony charges of money laundering or other serious crimes.

More than 140 people reluctantly accepted that deal from June 2006 to June 2008, according to court records. Among them were a black grandmother from Akron, who surrendered $4,000 in cash after Tenaha police pulled her over, and an interracial couple from Houston, who gave up more than $6,000 after police threatened to seize their children and put them into foster care, the court documents show. Neither the grandmother nor the couple were charged with or convicted of any crime.

Officials in Tenaha, situated along a heavily traveled state highway connecting Houston with several popular gambling destinations in Louisiana, say they are engaged in a battle against drug trafficking, and they call the search-and-seizure practice a legitimate use of the state's asset-forfeiture law. That law permits local police agencies to keep drug money and other property used in the commission of a crime and add the proceeds to their budgets.

"We try to enforce the law here," said George Bowers, mayor of the town of 1,046 residents, where boarded-up businesses outnumber open ones and City Hall sports a broken window. "We're not doing this to raise money. That's all I'm going to say at this point."

But civil rights lawyers call Tenaha's practice something else: highway robbery. The attorneys have filed a federal class-action lawsuit to stop what they contend is an unconstitutional perversion of the law's intent, aimed primarily at African-Americans who have done nothing wrong.

Tenaha officials "have developed an illegal 'stop and seize' practice of targeting, stopping, detaining, searching and often seizing property from apparently non-white citizens and those traveling with non-white citizens," asserts the lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Texas.

The property seizures are not just happening in Tenaha. In southern parts of Texas near the Mexican border, for example, Hispanics allege that they are being singled out.

According to a prominent Texas state legislator, police agencies across the state are wielding the asset-forfeiture law more aggressively to supplement their shrinking operating budgets.

"If used properly, it's a good law enforcement tool to see that crime doesn't pay," said state Sen. John Whitmire, chairman of the Senate's Criminal Justice Committee. "But in this instance, where people are being pulled over and their property is taken with no charges filed and no convictions, I think that's theft."

David Guillory, an attorney in Nacogdoches who filed the federal lawsuit, said he combed through Shelby County court records from 2006 to 2008 and discovered nearly 200 cases in which Tenaha police seized cash and property from motorists. In about 50 of the cases, suspects were charged with drug possession.

But in 147 others, Guillory said the court records showed, the police seized cash, jewelry, cell phones and sometimes even automobiles from motorists but never found any contraband or charged them with any crime. Of those, Guillory said he managed to contact 40 of the motorists directly - and discovered all but one of them were black.

"The whole thing is disproportionately targeted toward minorities, particularly African-Americans," Guillory said. "Every one of these people is pulled over and told they did something, like, 'You drove too close to the white line.' That's not in the penal code, but it sounds plausible. None of these people have been charged with a crime, none were engaged in anything that looked criminal. The sole factor is that they had something that looked valuable."

In some cases, police used the fact that motorists were carrying large amounts of cash as evidence that they must have been involved in laundering drug money, even though Guillory said each of the drivers he contacted could account for where the money had come from and why they were carrying it - such as for a gambling trip to Shreveport, La., or to purchase a used car from a private seller.

Once the motorists were detained, the police and the local Shelby County district attorney quickly drew up legal papers presenting them with an option: waive their rights to their cash and property or face felony charges for crimes such as money laundering - and the prospect of having to hire a lawyer and return to Shelby County multiple times to attend court sessions to contest the charges.

The process apparently is so routine in Tenaha that Guillory discovered presigned and prenotarized police affidavits with blank spaces left for an officer to fill in a description of the property being seized.

Jennifer Boatright, her husband and two young children - a mixed-race family - were traveling from Houston to visit relatives in east Texas in April 2007 when Tenaha police pulled them over, alleging that they were driving in a left-turn lane.

After searching the car, the officers discovered what Boatright said was a gift for her sister: a small, unused glass pipe made for smoking marijuana. Although they found no drugs or other contraband, the police seized $6,037 that Boatright said the family was carrying to purchase a used car - and then threatened to turn their children, ages 10 and 1, over to Child Protective Services if the couple didn't agree to sign over their right to their cash.

"It was give them the money or they were taking our kids," Boatright said. "They suggested that we never bring it up again. We figured we better give them our cash and get the hell out of there."

Several months later, after Boatright and her husband contacted an attorney, Tenaha officials returned their money but offered no explanation or apology. The couple remains plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit.

Except for Tenaha's mayor, none of the defendants in the federal lawsuit, including Shelby County District Attorney Linda Russell and two Tenaha police officers, responded to requests from the Chicago Tribune for comment about their search-and-seizure practices. Lawyers for the defendants also declined to comment, as did several of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

But Whitmire says he doesn't need to await the suit's outcome to try to fix what he regards as a statewide problem. On Monday he introduced a bill in the state Legislature that would require police to go before a judge before attempting to seize property under the asset-forfeiture law - and ultimately Whitmire hopes to tighten the law further so that law enforcement officials will be allowed to seize property only after a suspect is charged and convicted in a court.

"The law has gotten away from what was intended, which was to take the profits of a bad guy's crime spree and use it for additional crime fighting," Whitmire said. "Now it's largely being used to pay police salaries - and it's being abused because you don't even have to be a bad guy to lose your property."

(c) 2009, Chicago Tribune.Visit the Chicago Tribune on the Internet at http://www.chicagotribune.com/Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

19) Obama Signals Readiness to Further Militarize Drug War with Potential Deployment of National Guard to Mexico BorderMarch 13, 2009http://www.democracynow.org/2009/3/13/obama_signals_readiness_to_further_militarize

President Obama is considering deploying National Guard troops along the border with Mexico in response to the escalating drug war. More than 7,000 people have been killed in Mexico in drug-related violence in the last year. Much of the drug-related violence in Mexico has been fueled by the ability of drug cartels to purchase AK-47 assault rifles and other arms in the United States. We host a roundtable discussion with Laura Carlsen of the Center for International Policy, NYU professor and author Greg Grandin, and Paul Helmke of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. [includes rush transcript]

Guests:

Laura Carlsen, director of the Mexico City-based Americas Policy Program of the Center for International Policy. Her latest article is called "Drug War Doublespeak."

Greg Grandin, professor of Latin American history at NYU and author of Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism. His forthcoming book is Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City.

Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

Related Links

"Drug War Doublespeak" by Laura Carlsen

JUAN GONZALEZ: President Obama is considering deploying National Guard troops along the border with Mexico in response to the escalating drug war. In his most direct comments so far on Mexico's fight against drug cartels, Obama told reporters from regional newspapers, quote, "We're going to examine whether and if National Guard deployments would make sense and under what circumstances they would make sense." But Obama ruled out any immediate military move.

More than a thousand people have been killed in Mexico in drug-related violence this year. 6,000 people died last year. Vice President Joe Biden highlighted the threat posed by drug traffickers this week when he announced Gil Kerlikowske as the new drug czar.

VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Since the beginning of last year, there have been nearly 7,000 drug-related murders in Mexico. If we had said that years ago, we would have looked at each other like we were crazy. But 7,000 drug-related murders in Mexico. Violent drug trafficking organizations are threatening both the United States and Mexican communities.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Last week, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the US military is ready to help Mexico in its fight against drug cartels with some of the same counterinsurgency tactics used against militant networks in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mullen made the comment after meeting with high-ranking Mexican officials in Mexico City. Mullen said he emphasized the Pentagon's readiness to provide new intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance help, such as unmanned drones to spy on drug gangs, especially along the US border.

His comments came in the wake of a report issued by US Joint Forces Command late last year that grouped Mexico with Pakistan as a state that could undergo a "rapid and sudden collapse." Last Sunday, during an interview on Meet the Press, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the US military will increase its support of Mexico.

ROBERT GATES: I think we are beginning to be in a position to help the Mexicans more than we have in the past. Some of the old biases against cooperation with our-between our militaries and so on, I think, are being set aside.

DAVID GREGORY: You mean providing military support?

ROBERT GATES: No, providing them with-with training, with resources, with reconnaissance and surveillance kinds of capabilities, but just cooperation, including in intelligence.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Meanwhile, on Tuesday, a House subcommittee considered the Department of Homeland Security's request for additional border security funding in light of the increasing violence. This is Jayson Ahern, Acting Commissioner of US Customs and Border Protection.

JAYSON AHERN: So far, that kind of violence has been contained in Mexico, but we certainly do not want to see it spill over in the United States. And to that end, we have developed very detailed contingency plans to maintain control of the border as we move forward. While in recent years we've certainly focused on threats coming into the United States, Secretary Napolitano has made it clear that southbound enforcement, keeping guns and money out of the hands of criminals in Mexico, will be a priority for us. To this end, we'll dedicate additional personnel and technology to combat this threat, and we're finalizing our enhanced operational plans at this time.

JUAN GONZALEZ: For its part, Mexico recently announced it will send a total of 7,000 soldiers and federal police officers into the border city of Ciudad Juarez, where 1,600 people died last year in drug-related violence. Ciudad Juarez is located across the US border from El Paso, Texas. In a recent visit to El Paso, Texas Governor Rick Perry called for 1,000 US troops to be deployed to protect the border. But the mayor of El Paso, John Cook, has expressed concern about militarizing the border.

MAYOR JOHN COOK: Soldiers are trained to kill. That's what their job is. The job of the Border Patrol is different; it's to protect the border. So, just the training that goes into it and understanding what the law is, understanding who has a right to be in certain places, is not something that soldiers usually pay much attention to. They set up a perimeter, and they defend it, and they kill anybody who comes into their territory. I don't really want that to happen in the city of El Paso. I don't want our border militarized.

AMY GOODMAN: Much of the drug-related violence in Mexico has been fueled by the ability of drug cartels to purchase AK-47 assault rifles and other arms in the US. According to law enforcement officials, 90 percent of the guns picked up in Mexico from criminal activity are purchased in the United States. Last month, fifty-four Congress members wrote to President Obama backing Mexican calls to enforce a ban on the imports of assault weapons, which are often shipped to Mexico.

For more, we're joined by three guests. But we're going to begin in Las Cruces in Mexico-New Mexico with Laura Carlsen. She's the director of the Mexico City-based Americas Policy Program for the Center for International Policy. Her latest article is called "Drug War Doublespeak." She's joining us by video stream. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Laura.

LAURA CARLSEN: Thank you, Amy. Thank you for the invitation.

AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you with us. Your piece is called "Drug War Doublespeak," and you start by talking about the "blitzkrieg of declarations from US government and military officials and pundits [...] claming Mexico was alternately at risk of being a failed state [and] on the verge of a civil war." What do you think is actually happening there? LAURA CARLSEN: Well, we've been very surprised at this barrage of statements recently. And there are two reasons, basically. A lot of the talk has been focused on Mexico's national security threat. Mexico has a very serious problem with violence, and that's a predictable result of the drug war model that's being applied, but it is not a threat to US national security.

When we started to look at some of these articles talking about spillover of Mexican violence into the United States, what we found is that there's no evidence of that whatsoever at this point. The articles begin talking about the violence in Mexico, some of the worst cases. Then they jump to declarations by public officials, and there's no evidence of what's actually happening in the United States, because we simply don't have that. In the case of using statistics, like there's a lot of talk about the number of kidnappings in Phoenix, it turns out that many times those statistics are spurious, and they have no backup. They've been invented, or they've been twisted in many cases.

This is a real warning sign for us, because when we see an exaggerated threat assessment, as we're seeing right now in terms of spillover of Mexican violence to the United States, it's generally a prelude to militarization. And in fact, with Governor Perry requesting soldiers on the border and the National Guard, we're already seeing a buildup for that kind of militarization.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, you also talk about, in your article, the Mérida Initiative that President Bush originally announced. What was that, and how has it faired?

LAURA CARLSEN: The Mérida Initiative was designed by President Bush in October of 2007, and essentially this is a drug war model. It's a copy of Plan Colombia, that we have six years and $6 billion of experience with and that the GAO itself has called a failure in stopping drug flows. It provides military equipment and US goods and services-no cash-to Mexico in order to supposedly reduce the power of the cartels. The first appropriations were 2008, and just last week the second appropriations, $300 million for Mexico in 2009, were passed. The Mérida Initiative supports the offensive of President Felipe Calderon in Mexico, which, as I said, is this model of interdiction and enforcement that almost completely ignores the public health aspects of the drug problem. Since it's gone into effect, the US narcotics report itself reports that there's been a decrease in seizures, an increase in production, and most importantly, what we've already seen is this incredible increase in the violence. If last year's numbers were-the 2007 numbers were approximately 2,500 narco-related deaths. The figures for 2008 were 6,290. And they're going up. This violence is predictable: when you fight violence with violence, what you get is more violence.

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to go to break, then come back. Laura Carlsen, director of the Mexico City-based Americas Policy Program at the Center for International Policy, she's near the border. She's in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Her latest piece is called "Drug War Doublespeak." And then we're going to speak with the president of the Brady Center, talk about the guns that are coming over the border. And we'll be speaking with Professor Greg Grandin, who-his latest book coming out-he'll be talking about issues in Latin America. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We are joined by not only Laura Carlsen, who is here with us from Las Cruces, New Mexico. She is with the organization that looks at Mexico and Latin America. We're also-she's with the group called the Center for International Policy. We're also with Greg Grandin, professor of Latin America history at NYU. His new forthcoming book is called Fordlandia. Paul Helmke is with us, as well, president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. He's joining us from Washington. Juan?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes, I'd just like to ask Laura Carlsen another question, on the question of whether there is success occurring in this drug war in Mexico. On the one hand, you see the administration praising President Felipe Calderon and his initiatives. On the other hand, you see a continued rise in the supposed production of various types of drugs in Mexico. And also, the role of the Mexicans who have been deported from the United States from prisons here in the United States after they serve terms, is there any indication that this is having an impact on the level of violence and of the upsurge in the drug trafficking in Mexico?

LAURA CARLSEN: Well, first of all, it's very frustrating to see the way that these multiple failures of the drug war model, that's been roundly criticized now by the United Nations in the drug war policy meetings in Vienna, as well as by a high-level commission called the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, are continuously spun as successes. It's completely unacceptable to ask a society to accept higher levels of violence as a sign that we're winning the drug war. There's an increasing level of civilians that are being caught in the crossfire between the 45,000 army troops that are in the streets in Mexico and the drug cartels who are fighting for plazas. So, this is very frustrating. We know that this model doesn't work, because it's been applied before. And we know that it's not working in Mexico now.

I don't think the deportees have as much to do with the rising violence as do deserters from the army. That's where there's a very serious problem. One of the items included in the Mérida Initiative, a number of them have to do with increased training for the army and police forces. What we know is that with the high desertion rates that we have in the Mexican army and the high levels of corruption in both the police and the army, much of that training is going to go straight to the drug cartels.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go right now to Washington, D.C. Our guest there is Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. These latest figures that we have just gone through, the number of weapons that are being used, something like 90 percent of them from the United States-your piece-your organization's piece, "America's Weak Gun Laws Are Fueling the Violence in Mexico"-how?

PAUL HELMKE: The folks in Mexico have figured out what criminals in the US figured out a long time ago: our weak and nearly nonexistent laws in the US are making it very easy for these guns to get to Mexico. Most Americans don't realize that we basically have very few laws on the book, almost none, restricting access to guns. And so, it's very easy to go to unlicensed dealers, who basically can sell any kind of gun without any kind of background check, particularly gun shows, particularly in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico. They go to licensed dealers who are corrupt, and because Congress in effect shields them by keeping the information about where the records are, what the inventory is, who's in trouble, and making sure that ATF doesn't have the funding, that's where guns come from.

And the fact that we allow an unlimited number of guns, almost any kind of gun, very serious military-nearly military-style hardware, it's obvious that's why 90 to 95 percent of the guns are coming from the US. We are the world's gun bazaar, and the gangs in Mexico have figured it out. If anything, Mexico ought to be putting up their army at our border to check the cars coming from the US in to see who's bringing the guns in, because we make it so easy for dangerous people to get those guns.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, your article mentions that about one percent of all the licensed gun dealers represent 60 percent of the illegal gun sales.

PAUL HELMKE: Right.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Why doesn't the government crack down on those particular licensed dealers that are involved in this trafficking?

PAUL HELMKE: Seems pretty obvious to me. Actually, that information is a little old. Congress no longer allows that kind of information to be made public. That's from 2000, when it was said that 60 percent of the guns traced to crime come from one percent of the dealers.

But we only have enough ATF agents-it would take them twenty-one years to investigate every gun dealer to do-to stop by every gun dealer in the US. And in fact, we have laws on the books that say once you've investigated a gun dealer, a licensed gun dealer in the US, you cannot come back again for another twelve months unless you have a warrant. We make it harder to sell cigarettes to minors or liquor to minors than we do to sell guns in this country. And since you can go in again with a credit card and buy a thousand AK-47s, .50-caliber sniper rifles that can shoot down helicopters, it's obvious why they come to the US to get their guns.

AMY GOODMAN: Paul Helmke-

PAUL HELMKE: We do nothing to stop-almost nothing to stop dangerous people from getting them.

AMY GOODMAN: I remember when President Bush first took office and the statement of the NRA, "We're now going to be operating out of the Oval Office."

PAUL HELMKE: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you still see their power at that level today? And what do you feel needs to be done?

PAUL HELMKE: Clearly, we have a lot stronger supporters with President Obama, Vice President Biden, Attorney General Holder, Rahm Emanuel, others in the administration. Elected officials in Congress, however, are still scared to death of the NRA for some reason. They think that the NRA is powerful, even though the NRA basically hasn't won a single contested election in either the '06 cycle or the '08 cycle. We don't know of any person who's lost because of standing for commonsense gun control over the last two elections. But a lot of politicians are afraid of them, even though when we poll people at exit polls, 75 to 85 percent of gun owners, McCain voters, Republicans, as well as the general American public, support things like doing background checks in all sales, strengthening ATFs so we can stop this illegal trade in gun, restricting some of the weapons that are easily available to the general public.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And even we covered-I think it was last week that the passage of-giving D.C. the right to have a voting member of Congress, it was stuck into that bill the elimination or the reduction of D.C.'s strong gun control laws.

PAUL HELMKE: Clearly sad. D.C.'s law was challenged. The Supreme Court spoke up last summer, said D.C. went too far. But the Supreme Court, Justice Scalia speaking, said you can still have restrictions on who gets guns, what types of guns, where you take guns, how they're sold, how they're marketed, how they're carried. But Congress thinks they know the Constitution better than the Supreme Court. And the Senate, sadly, the other week, said that D.C. City Council didn't get it right, and so they want to play super city council in the sky and basically say, "You can't have a vote in Congress unless we can gut your gun laws totally." That's ridiculous, and it does show the power of the gun lobby.

AMY GOODMAN: Paul Helmke, the case that just went on trial this week in Phoenix, Arizona, of a gun store owner who went on trial on charges he sold more than 700 weapons to straw buyers, knowing the firearms were bought on behalf of Mexican drug syndicates?

PAUL HELMKE: Right, happens all the time. A straw buyer is someone who knows they can't pass a background check, so they get someone else. And basically, the straw buyer says, "Let me look at that gun. How much does it cost? How does it feel?" And then they have someone else with them fill out the paperwork, obvious straw buyers.

We don't do enough in this country to crack down on that, and it's because, basically, we are not serious. We want everybody to have a gun for any purpose.

That gun dealer actually was originally in California, which has the best gun laws in this country, and he moved to Arizona, because it was too hard for him to sell those guns in California and he knew that in Arizona it would be a lot easier for him to market these to the gangs and the drug cartels in Mexico.

AMY GOODMAN: Greg Grandin is also with this, a professor of Latin American history at New York University, NYU, here in New York, just down the road. Can you put the policy of the US with Mexico in context, overall, in Latin America right now?

GREG GRANDIN: Well, the logic context is two things. One is the rise of the left throughout most of South America, in which the US has lost influence in what used to be called its backyard. But it also-and the reason for the rise of the left is the second part of the context, and that's the absolute failure of economic policies, starting with NAFTA and even before, what's generally known as neoliberalism or the Washington Consensus.

All the drug war is is a crystallization, in a lot of ways, of all of the pressures brought to bear on the Mexican state by privatization, by deregulation, through the opening of the economy. In some ways, you see a direct relationship between the recession of the state, particularly in northern Mexico, and the vacuum created, which is filled by the cartels. Society, no less than nature, abhors a vacuum. And in many ways, the cartels have functioned as the state, and they tax businesses, they create infrastructure, they provide jobs. The money raised-the money, the profits by narcotics industry in Mexico, billions of dollars-some estimates are $30 billion a year-are injected into Mexican banks. They keep Mexican banks afloat.

So, in many ways, what you're seeing here with the drug wars in Mexico is a death match between different sectors of elites trying to assume state powers. And when Felipe Calderon took power and came to office in 2006, he declared a war on drugs, and he sent troops into Juarez and other cities in the north, and that's what kicked off this cycle of violence. It's nowhere close to being a failed state. That is hysteria. I think that's right. But there is a serious crisis in Mexico. And the larger conflict-context, of course, is that a hundred years ago-we're coming up on the hundredth anniversary of the Mexican Revolution, and so I guess what's called a failed state now, back then, was called a revolution. So I think Mexicans are acutely aware that.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Greg, you mentioned when Felipe Calderon came to office. Obviously, we tend to forget that he was elected in perhaps the most controversial election in Mexican history, a very, very close margin against a leftist candidate, Lopez Obrador. Is there some concern that this increase in militarization, both within Mexico and now possibly from the United States side of the border, will have some impact on the continuing political dynamic within Mexico?

GREG GRANDIN: Oh, I think there's a clear concern that the Mexican state, the promise of democratization that happened with the election of PAN and Vicente Fox two cycles back has not been delivered, that there's-that both main political-that all three main political parties, the PAN, the PRI and the PRD, are losing its ability to channel dissent and protest and popular aspirations through the political process.

And you see the growth of social movements and protest, not just in Chiapas, of course, with the Zapatistas, but we saw Oaxaca, saw the crisis in Oaxaca. And we saw a lot of the rhetoric of the war on drugs and the war on terror being used to repress dissent in Oaxaca. And in Chihuahua, people protesting the privatization of water and other natural resources have been locked up and have been physically repressed under the aegis of the war on terror and the war on drugs. So you're seeing a kind of synergy of all of these different crises coming together in Mexico.

AMY GOODMAN: President Obama is weighing the possibility of sending more troops to the border. Do you think some of that-you were mentioning having to do with the economy, of many more Mexicans having to come up, of-not about drugs, but about people who are being squeezed all over the world?

GREG GRANDIN: They're being squeezed. But what's interesting about this particular crisis, I read some statistics that actually in every other economic crisis that Mexico has had throughout the last thirty or forty years, there's been a-it's been correlated with an increase of migration to the United States. This is the first time where there's actually a reverse in migration, because of the economy tanking in the US. And along with that, remittances have fallen. So, in some ways, migration has served as a safety valve from Mexican politics since 1968. And what you're seeing is a shutting down of that safety valve, which increases the pressures that Juan was talking about within Mexican society.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I'd like to ask Laura Carlsen, if we could get you back in the conversation here, for those of us who have had the opportunity from time to time to cross the border between Mexico and the US, there's an amazing difference between how you are treated when you're coming from the US into Mexico versus from Mexico into the US, in terms of the type of inspection and processes that you have to go through. As Paul Helmke was suggesting, maybe if the Mexican army would start searching cars coming from or trucks coming from the United States into Mexico, they might be able to interdict many of these weapons that are coming in illegally.

AMY GOODMAN: Laura, are you there?

LAURA CARLSEN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Could you respond to that?

LAURA CARLSEN: Well, I think there's a complete double standard in terms of what is really a transnational problem--everyone recognizes it's a transnational problem-and the way that it's viewed in Mexico and the United States. By talking about spillover and many of the measures, the Mérida Initiative included, that focus only on the Mexican responsibility for this problem, what the United States is doing is washing its hands of these kinds of problems, including the drug-the gunrunning, as well as being the largest market and the reason for existence for these drug cartels.

When there's drug activity in the United States, it doesn't mean it's spilling over from Mexico. This is a normal part of the transnational drug trade. The United States is responsible for its share of corruption, by letting these kinds of illegal substances into the country, by the illegal trade in guns and money laundering that supports the drug industry on the ground in Mexico and other places. And so, by pushing the entire onus of this onto Mexico, it's releasing itself from responsibilities in many ways that's completely unacceptable and creating an image that there's a contagion coming from the south, which is Mexico, into a fundamentally healthy organism, which is US society, and we all know that isn't true.

AMY GOODMAN: Laura Carlsen, President Calderon said, to say Mexico doesn't have authority over all its national territories is absolutely false and absurd. He said the media is mounting a campaign of lies against Mexico. What do you think has to happen?

LAURA CARLSEN: Yeah, I think that's basically true. Any definition of a failed state, when you look at it technically and including the rankings that they do of failed states, Mexico does not qualify. There are places where the drug cartels have significant power. It's not that there's a total absence of the state. The drug cartels don't want to be the state. They don't want to take over the state. What they want to do is they want to carry out their business, a very lucrative business.

What I think has to happen is that we have to get rid of this failed drug war model and we have to start looking at other options. The Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy that was run by former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria, came out with a recommendation saying it's time to completely change course on this. What we have to do is start looking at illegal drug use as a public health problem; cease to criminalize it; stop having these confrontations, bloody confrontations, in the street with the drug cartels; and focus repressive measures just on organized crime. And at the same time, they came out and suggested that we take a serious look at legalization, in some cases, of drugs, because the only way this is really going to stop is when that market doesn't exist anymore. And the prohibitionist policies that have been put in place until now have completely failed.

AMY GOODMAN: Greg Grandin, on a different note, Salvador elections on Sunday?

GREG GRANDIN: Well, the polls show that the election is close. The FMLN candidate, which would have-which, if he does win, it will end nearly twenty years of ARENA right-wing rule, the ARENA party being linked to the death squad in the civil war of El Salvador in the 1980s. Mauricio Funes was well ahead in the polls, but there's been a major scare campaign.

JUAN GONZALEZ: That's the candidate of the FMLN.

GREG GRANDIN: That's the candidate of the FMLN. There's been a major scare campaign over the last two or three months, along the lines of what happened in Mexico, bringing it back to Mexico, with Manuel Lopez Obrador in 2006, which linked him to Chavez. And Lopez Obrador was well ahead in the polls, scheduled to win, and at the last minute it came in very close. Peru, we saw the same thing. So there's been an orchestrated attempt to link Funes with Chavez and also with the FARC in Colombia and scare Salvadoran voters into voting once again for ARENA. We saw the same thing in 2004.

Key to this, as you mentioned in the opening, is a threatening the Temporary Protection Status. There's about 2.5 million Salvadorans in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of them are here under what's known as a TPS, Temporary Protection Status, that was implemented in, I think, 1989, 1990, and it was a recognition of the migration, out-migration, exile, resulting from the violence of the civil war in the 1990s. And it's almost been a ritual of US politics every time there's a presidential election in El Salvador to threaten to revoke that TPS status. What you saw in El Salvador was headlines blared along all the right-wing newspapers, which is completely controlled by ARENA or affiliated with ARENA, announcing that Congress threatens to cut off TPS and remittances will fall and all of this, and all of this alarmism.

The Obama administration, the State Department, issued a neutrality statement yesterday. It was about a paragraph long, but it's not getting any attention within the Salvadoran press, and certainly not the headlines that the statements by Dan Burton and other Republican congressmen have received.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we'll certainly follow that story on Monday, what happens with the Salvador elections on Sunday. I want to thank you all for being with us. Greg Grandin, professor of Latin American history at NYU, his forthcoming book called Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City. Laura Carlsen, with us from Las Cruces, New Mexico, she is with the Center for International Policy. And finally, Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, speaking to us from Washington, D.C.

A study conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has cast doubt over Israel's survival beyond the next 20 years.

The CIA report predicts "an inexorable movement away from a two-state to a one-state solution, as the most viable model based on democratic principles of full equality that sheds the looming specter of colonial Apartheid while allowing for the return of the 1947/1948 and 1967 refugees. The latter being the precondition for sustainable peace in the region."

The study, which has been made available only to a certain number of individuals, further forecasts the return of all Palestinian refugees to the occupied territories, and the exodus of two million Israeli - who would move to the US in the next fifteen years.

"There is over 500,000 Israelis with American passports and more than 300,000 living in the area of just California," International lawyer Franklin Lamb said in an interview with Press TV on Friday, adding that those who do not have American or western passport, have already applied for them.

"So I think the handwriting at least among the public in Israel is on the wall...[which] suggests history will reject the colonial enterprise sooner or later," Lamb stressed.

He said CIA, in its report, alludes to the unexpectedly quick fall of the apartheid government in South Africa and recalls the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, suggesting the end to the dream of an 'Israeli land' would happen 'way sooner' than later.

The study further predicts the return of over one and a half million Israelis to Russia and other parts of Europe, and denotes a decline in Israeli births whereas a rise in the Palestinian population.

Lamb said given the Israeli conduct toward the Palestinians and the Gaza strip in particular, the American public -- which has been voicing its protest against Tel Aviv's measures in the last 25 years -- may 'not take it anymore'.

Some members of the US Senate Intelligence Committee have been informed of the report.

21) With Two Wars, U.S. Begins to Rethink an Old Doctrine"...the Obama administration would be seeking to come up with "a multiwar, multioperation, multifront, walk-and-chew-gum construct."By THOM SHANKERMarch 15, 2009

WASHINGTON - The protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are forcing the Obama administration to rethink what for more than two decades has been a central premise of American strategy: that the nation need only prepare to fight two major wars at a time.

For more than six years now, the United States has in fact been fighting two wars, with more than 170,000 troops now deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. The military has openly acknowledged that the wars have left troops and equipment severely strained, and has said that it would be difficult to carry out any kind of significant operation elsewhere.

To some extent, fears have faded that the United States may actually have to fight, say, Russia and North Korea, or China and Iran, at the same time. But if Iraq and Afghanistan were never formidable foes in conventional terms, they have already tied up the American military for a period longer than World War II.

A senior Defense Department official involved in a strategy review now under way said the Pentagon was absorbing the lesson that the kinds of counterinsurgency campaigns likely to be part of some future wars would require more staying power than in past conflicts, like the first Iraq war in 1991 or the invasions of Grenada and Panama.

In an interview with National Public Radio last week, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates made it clear that the Pentagon was beginning to reconsider whether the old two-wars assumption "makes any sense in the 21st century" as a guide to planning, budgeting and weapons-buying.

The discussion is being prompted by a top-to-bottom strategy review that the Pentagon conducts every four years, as required by Congress and officially called the Quadrennial Defense Review. One question on the table for Pentagon planners is whether there is a way to reshape the armed forces to provide for more flexibility in tackling a wide range of conflicts.

Among other questions are the extent to which planning for conflicts should focus primarily on counterinsurgency wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, and what focus remains on well-equipped conventional adversaries like China and Iran, with which Navy vessels have clashed at sea.

Thomas Donnelly, a defense policy expert with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said he believed that the Obama administration would be seeking to come up with "a multiwar, multioperation, multifront, walk-and-chew-gum construct."

"We have to do many things simultaneously if our goal is to remain the ultimate guarantor of international security," Mr. Donnelly said. "The hedge against a rising China requires a very different kind of force than fighting an irregular war in Afghanistan or invading Iraq or building partnership capacity in Africa."

But Mr. Donnelly cautioned that the review now under way faced a familiar challenge. "If there has been one consistent thread through all previous defense reviews," he said, "it is that once the review is done, there is an almost immediate gap between reality and force planning. Reality always exceeds force planning."

It is already is obvious, a senior Pentagon official said, that the Defense Department will "need to rebalance our strategy and our forces" in a way that reflects lessons from Afghanistan and Iraq. Exactly how that happens will be debated for months to come and will then play out in decisions involving hundreds of billions of dollars, involving the size of the Army, as well as such things as the number of aircraft carriers and new long-range bombers.

Michael E. O'Hanlon, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, a liberal-centrist policy organization, said that senior Pentagon officials knew that the new review needed to more fully analyze what the rest of the government could bring to national security.

"We have Gates and others saying that other parts of the government are underresourced and that the DoD should not be called on to do everything" Mr. O'Hanlon said. "That's a good starting point for this - to ask and at least begin answering where it might be better to have other parts of the government get stronger and do a bigger share, rather than the Department of Defense."

Among the refinements to the two-wars strategy the Pentagon has incorporated in recent years is one known as "win-hold-win" - an assumption that if two wars broke out simultaneously, the more threatening conflict would get the bulk of American forces while the military would have to defend along a second front until reinforcements could arrive to finish the job.

Another formulation envisioned the United States defending its territory, deterring hostility in four critical areas of the world and then defeating two adversaries in major combat operations, but not at exactly the same time.

The Bush administration's most recent strategy, completed four years ago, added requirements that the military be equipped to deal with a broad range of missions in addition to war-fighting, including defeating violent extremists, defending American territory, helping countries at strategic crossroads and preventing terrorists and adversaries from obtaining biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.

But Pentagon officials are now asking whether the current reality, with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq already outlasting World War II, really fits any of those models. "One of the things that stresses our force greatly is long-duration operations," the senior Pentagon official said. "It's the requirement to continue to rotate forces in over many, many rotations that really strains a lot of the force."

21) $100 Billion the Country Could Use EditorialMarch 14, 2009http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/opinion/14sat1.html

Senate investigators estimate that Americans who hide assets in offshore bank accounts are failing to pay about $100 billion a year in taxes. In good times, that's grossly unfair and bad for the country. In times like these, it should be intolerable. The government not only needs the money, but closing down such tax scams is essential for President Obama's rescue effort to retain public support and credibility.

Some of the banks at the center of the global financial meltdown are prominent purveyors of evasion services. UBS of Switzerland has acknowledged that as of Sept. 30, it held about 47,000 secret accounts for Americans. It has refused to disclose the names of all but a tiny number of the account holders, arguing that it would be a breach of Swiss law. But last month - after UBS got caught soliciting business in the United States - it admitted to breaking federal law by helping Americans hide assets, and the bank agreed to pay $780 million in fines and restitution.

The United States Treasury isn't the only one being shorted. The Tax Justice Network, a research and advocacy organization, estimates $11.5 trillion in assets from around the world are hidden in offshore havens.

The United States also isn't the only country running out of patience. In February, European leaders forged an unusually tough and united call to put the problem of "uncooperative jurisdictions" near the top of the agenda for the April summit of leading economies in London. (Finance ministers will discuss the issue at a preparatory meeting in London this weekend.)

Bankers and their host countries are feeling the heat. In recent days, a rash of governments, including Andorra, Liechtenstein, Singapore and Hong Kong have said they would increase the transparency of their offshore banking business and share more information with tax authorities in depositors' home countries.

Even the Swiss government has caved - somewhat. On Friday, it announced that it would exchange information with tax authorities in other countries on the basis of "specific and justified" requests, though it resolutely rejected "any form of automatic exchange of information." Meanwhile, UBS promised to close its secret American accounts and not open any more. The United States is taking UBS to court to try to get the bank to reveal the identities of thousands of accounts.

The government needs more tools to crack down on such international tax evasion. The Internal Revenue Service relies on taxpayers to disclose any foreign bank accounts, and it has no means to routinely get that information from banks in jurisdictions that protect secrecy.

Senator Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, is considering legislation that would require banks to inform the I.R.S. when their clients wire money abroad. Senator Carl Levin has introduced a bill that, among other provisions, would allow the United States to bar banks in this country from doing business with foreign banks that refused to cooperate with American tax authorities.

This problem can't be fixed solely by American law. At the London summit, American officials should work with other governments to come up with a common set of rules to pry information from tax havens.

There are a variety of ideas worth serious consideration. Governments could revoke tax treaties with countries that refuse to cooperate with tax queries - making it much more cumbersome for their companies to do international business. They could restrict their own banks from doing business with banks in uncooperative countries or subject any business with these countries to higher standards of disclosure.

They could start now by publishing blacklists of countries and banks that refuse to cooperate with requests for information from fiscal authorities. A few years ago, most banks and tax havens would have shrugged off such an effort. But in the current environment, they seem to be more sensitive to public shaming.

THIS week in Vienna, a meeting of the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs took place that will help shape international antidrug efforts for the next 10 years. I attended the meeting to reaffirm Bolivia's commitment to this struggle but also to call for the reversal of a mistake made 48 years ago.

In 1961, the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs placed the coca leaf in the same category with cocaine - thus promoting the false notion that the coca leaf is a narcotic - and ordered that "coca leaf chewing must be abolished within 25 years from the coming into force of this convention." Bolivia signed the convention in 1976, during the brutal dictatorship of Col. Hugo Banzer, and the 25-year deadline expired in 2001.

So for the past eight years, the millions of us who maintain the traditional practice of chewing coca have been, according to the convention, criminals who violate international law. This is an unacceptable and absurd state of affairs for Bolivians and other Andean peoples.

Many plants have small quantities of various chemical compounds called alkaloids. One common alkaloid is caffeine, which is found in more than 50 varieties of plants, from coffee to cacao, and even in the flowers of orange and lemon trees. Excessive use of caffeine can cause nervousness, elevated pulse, insomnia and other unwanted effects.

Another common alkaloid is nicotine, found in the tobacco plant. Its consumption can lead to addiction, high blood pressure and cancer; smoking causes one in five deaths in the United States. Some alkaloids have important medicinal qualities. Quinine, for example, the first known treatment for malaria, was discovered by the Quechua Indians of Peru in the bark of the cinchona tree.

The coca leaf also has alkaloids; the one that concerns antidrug officials is the cocaine alkaloid, which amounts to less than one-tenth of a percent of the leaf. But as the above examples show, that a plant, leaf or flower contains a minimal amount of alkaloids does not make it a narcotic. To be made into a narcotic, alkaloids must typically be extracted, concentrated and in many cases processed chemically. What is absurd about the 1961 convention is that it considers the coca leaf in its natural, unaltered state to be a narcotic. The paste or the concentrate that is extracted from the coca leaf, commonly known as cocaine, is indeed a narcotic, but the plant itself is not.

Why is Bolivia so concerned with the coca leaf? Because it is an important symbol of the history and identity of the indigenous cultures of the Andes.

The custom of chewing coca leaves has existed in the Andean region of South America since at least 3000 B.C. It helps mitigate the sensation of hunger, offers energy during long days of labor and helps counter altitude sickness. Unlike nicotine or caffeine, it causes no harm to human health nor addiction or altered state, and it is effective in the struggle against obesity, a major problem in many modern societies.

Today, millions of people chew coca in Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and northern Argentina and Chile. The coca leaf continues to have ritual, religious and cultural significance that transcends indigenous cultures and encompasses the mestizo population.

Mistakes are an unavoidable part of human history, but sometimes we have the opportunity to correct them. It is time for the international community to reverse its misguided policy toward the coca leaf.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Three missiles thought to have been fired from remotely piloted American aircraft struck a Taliban training camp in northwestern Pakistan and killed 21 militants, according to a local government official and news reports on Friday.

Fifteen other people were wounded in the strike, from about 9:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Thursday, on a training camp some 20 miles from Parachinar, the capital of the Kurram tribal area, according to the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The camp was under the command of Fazal Saeed, a local militant commander aligned with the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud. On Friday evening, the official said the dead were all militants.

The attack was the sixth on Mr. Mehsud's camps in the tribal areas since President Obama took office, expanding the covert war run by the Central Intelligence Agency and carried out largely by remotely piloted aircraft.

WASHINGTON - President Obama is considering a request by Gov. Rick Perry of Texas to deploy National Guard troops along the southern border to stop a devastating wave of violence from spilling into this country from Mexico.

Mr. Obama spoke about the request Wednesday with a group of reporters from regional newspapers. He said that he did not favor "militarizing the border," and that his staff was preparing a "comprehensive strategy" for working with Mexico to stem both the flow of drugs into the United States and the flow of guns into Mexico.

But Mr. Obama added that he would "examine whether and if National Guard deployments would make sense, and in what circumstances they would make sense as part of this overall review of our border situation."

Those comments followed a series of hearings at which members of Congress characterized the deteriorating situation in Mexico as a major threat to national security, and criticized the Obama administration, saying it had not offered a specific strategy for dealing with the problem.

At one of those hearings, Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, told legislators that Mexico was not in control of parts of its territory. The statements put new strain on the United States' long-conflicted relationship with Mexico. Speaking about Mr. Blair's statements, President Felipe Calderón said he believed there was a new "campaign" against his country.

"I challenge anyone to tell me to what point in national territory they want to go, and I will take them," Mr. Calderón said in a speech Thursday.

He acknowledged the magnitude of Mexico's fight and added that its problems were a consequence of Mexico's location next to "the biggest consumer of drugs in the world and the largest supplier of weapons in the world."

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will visit Mexico on March 25 and 26. Aides said the trip was meant to demonstrate the Obama administration's support for Mr. Calderón's efforts and to talk about ways to expand cooperation in areas like trade.

Topping the agenda, officials said, would be discussions about ways to increase cooperation through a $1.4 billion plan approved by the Bush administration that includes weapons and training for Mexican security forces.

Officials said trips to Mexico were also being planned by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.

JERUSALEM - A 37-year-old American was badly hurt on Friday in a clash between Israeli troops and demonstrators protesting the extension of Israel's separation barrier in the West Bank.

The American, Tristan Anderson, from Oakland, Calif., was hit in the head by a tear-gas canister near the West Bank town of Ramallah, according to witnesses, and he was taken to Tel Hashomer hospital in Tel Aviv. An army spokeswoman said his condition was severe but stable.

Ulrike Anderson, a Swedish high school teacher with the International Solidarity Movement who is not related to the wounded man, said she was standing about 10 feet from him when he was hit.

"The Israeli soldiers were standing on the hill looking over us firing tear-gas canisters," Ms. Anderson said by telephone. "Tristan was hit and fell to the ground. He had a large hole in the front of his head. I tried to stop the bleeding. He was bleeding heavily from the nose."

The army spokeswoman said there were about 400 violent demonstrators at the village of Niilin, west of Ramallah, many of them throwing rocks at the troops. The forces shot back, she said, but not with live fire.

Ms. Anderson estimated the crowd at 200 and said that by the time Mr. Anderson was hit, the crowd had largely dissipated. She said she and several other activists had been living in Niilin since last summer, when construction on the barrier there started, and had been taking part in weekly demonstrations against it.

Israel has been building a barrier made up of fencing and walls for about five years. It says it is aimed at stopping terrorists from entering Israel; Palestinians and other opponents say that it takes land away and makes daily life very difficult for the Palestinian villagers there.

The International Solidarity Movement is a Palestinian-led group that opposes Israel's occupation of the West Bank. It leads demonstrations against the barrier every Friday at several West Bank locations.

Mr. Anderson, 37, came to Israel two weeks ago to join his girlfriend, who is also active in opposing the barrier and the occupation of the West Bank, said Sasha Solanas, a volunteer at the International Solidarity Movement's office in Ramallah.

He had been active with the organization in the United States, Ms. Solanas said, and he had participated in protests at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2007 and 2008 against plans to cut down or transplant 42 trees in a campus grove in order to make way for a new athletic center.

As the recession deepens, doctors and hospitals are reporting that hard-pressed patients are deferring elective surgery, like knee replacements and nose jobs, even as others are speeding up non-urgent procedures out of fear that they may soon lose their jobs and health insurance.

With unemployment still rising, there are wide variations by region and type of surgery. That means that highly regarded orthopedic surgeons in Chicago may be as busy as ever, while gastroenterologists in Atlanta are scrambling to fill cancellations.

But even those whose operating rooms are booked months in advance say they anticipate a slowdown later this year.

Delaying elective procedures can have serious medical consequences, as when a detectable polyp develops into a tumor because a patient skips a colonoscopy. Some hospitals said their emergency rooms were already seeing patients with dire conditions that could have been avoided had they not deferred surgery for economic reasons.

"We're probably seeing five or six of those a day at each of our hospitals," said Zeff Ross, a senior vice president at Memorial Healthcare System, which operates six hospitals in South Florida. "Someone gets an attack of diverticulitis, but they wait. They get it a second time and the doctor tells them to get the surgery done now, but they still wait. The third time, it perforates and that's a much tougher surgery, much more dangerous for the patient and with a longer length of stay."

The slowdown is likely to have significant financial repercussions. Elective operations are typically covered by private insurance plans that tend to reimburse hospitals and doctors at higher rates than government insurance programs like Medicare and Medicaid. As those payments dwindle, so do hospital profit margins and the resources to provide charity care to a growing number of uninsured.

"Elective admissions could represent only 9 or 10 percent of a hospital's admissions and yet represent 25 percent of its bottom line," said Michael A. Sachs, chief executive of Sg2, a health care consulting firm. "They're the patients that subsidize the underfunding associated with Medicaid and Medicare patients and uncompensated care."

The loss of revenue and growth in uncompensated care is conspiring with other byproducts of the recession - declining philanthropy, battered investments and tight credit - to force many hospitals to lay off workers, postpone expansions and cancel equipment purchases.

A study released in November by the American Hospital Association found that about one-third of hospitals had seen either a moderate or significant decrease in elective procedures in the previous three months. More recent studies in states like New Jersey and Georgia have put the figure closer to 50 percent. Ambulatory surgical centers, which had experienced exponential growth over the last decade, are also reporting a slowdown in some markets.

Dr. David S. George, an Ohio ophthalmologist who with two other physicians owns an outpatient eye center, said they performed 5 percent fewer cataract operations in 2008 than in 2007, following nearly a decade of consistent 10 percent annual growth.

"That was the first down year we've had," Dr. George said. "When we tell patients about the benefits of cataract surgery, we're getting more answers like, 'Well, it's not that bad yet. Let's check it out in six months or a year.' Even those with good insurance are very concerned about the co-pay and the out-of-pocket costs."

That is the case for Jane Bagwell, a 60-year-old legal secretary in Atlanta, who has chosen to delay surgery to repair a torn rotator cuff in her left shoulder, even though she rates her pain as an 8 on a scale of 1 to 10.

In a less terrifying economy, Ms. Bagwell said, she would not hesitate to schedule the operation. These days, however, she finds herself pinching every penny, including the ones that would help her pay the 20 percent share of surgical costs not covered by insurance. And given that her law firm is laying off staff members, she worries that if she took three weeks off to recuperate, her job might be eliminated before she could return.

Instead, she pops ibuprofen. "I feel like I live off them," she said.

The trends are far from universal, with some physicians and hospitals saying they have seen little change. Several doctors interviewed reported that some of their patients were deferring procedures while others were accelerating them.

"They're trying to get things done next week because they know they're going to be losing their insurance or going to Cobra," said Dr. Jeffrie L. Kamean, an Atlanta gastroenterologist.

Dr. Kamean was referring to the federal law that allows laid-off workers to continue their employer-sponsored insurance, though at costs that are often prohibitive (the federal stimulus package provides money to subsidize Cobra expenses).

Val Arnold, 37, a skin cancer survivor who lives in Holly, Mich., said she chose to have reconstructive surgery on her nose on Feb. 13 because she had been laid off from her job with General Motors and would lose her employer-sponsored insurance on March 1. She would have preferred to wait, so that she would be immediately available if the automaker reactivated her job.

"It was like all of a sudden I have to get it done now," Ms. Arnold said during her two-week recuperation. "What if they call me this week?"

Health experts predict that as the economy worsens, more insured people will begin deferring care because they cannot afford the high deductibles common in the insurance market.

"During good economic times, the trade-offs aren't as severe," said David Dranove, a professor of health-industry management at Northwestern University. "It's that $2,000 for elective surgery versus that vacation in Cancún. Now it's $2,000 for the surgery versus making the mortgage payments, and suddenly the surgery can wait."

At Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., outpatient surgical volumes are down 10 percent so far this year compared with 2008. At Elkhart General Hospital in Elkhart, Ind., site of a Caterpillar plant that has seen huge layoffs, the 498 operations in January were 28 fewer than in January 2008 and 63 fewer than projected in this year's budget, said Gregory W. Lintjer, the president.

"We're seeing a slowdown in hip and knee replacements, the kind of things that people can live with a little longer if they so choose," Mr. Lintjer said.

Not surprisingly, the steepest drop has been in plastic surgery, which is typically not covered by insurance. Dr. John W. Canady, the president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, said business seemed to be off by an average of 30 percent among his members, particularly for surgical procedures.

On the other hand, Dr. Canady said, plastic surgeons are starting to field requests for Botox and other minor aesthetic improvements from middle-aged patients who find themselves competing for jobs against younger applicants.